Comment by kevb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevb | Hacker News Reader

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App stores are great for commercial developers but culturally clash with open source apps. If someone were to take grep and commercialize it, no one would use it. (Though I have seen stories about it happening with Blender). But if grep were an app in the Play Store, and it was open source, someone would grab the source, commercialize it, and maybe even invest in advertising to make their grep to the most popular one.

Spare Parts is (was?) part of the Android Open Source Project, but got posted to the Android Market with ads added and only minor changes. Romain Guy (of Google's Android team) posted sample code for a Shelves application and had the same experience.

I love open source, but make my living with closed source Android apps. One of my early projects actually was an LED flashlight app. I tried selling it for a week or two, then switched to a free and donate model which doesn't make much money. My other apps do, and it's just a flashlight so I have no interest in monetizing it. I also rarely update it, don't answer support emails for it, and certainly don't buy banner ads to promote it. Without any marketing effort on my part, there is no way it will compete with the commercial offerings. I've considered open sourcing it, and maybe I should, but I'm still a bit attached, as it was one of my first apps, and I'd hate to see a fork of it with ads and junk grow more popular than it. I also wouldn't have much time to review pull requests and build/test new APKs to publish.

The app is TeslaLED. If it works on your device (works on most modern devices) then it's probably what you're looking for. Sadly if it doesn't it is unlikely to get updated in the near future with support.

> Romain Guy (of Google's Android team) posted sample code for a Shelves application and had the same experience.

As a 3rd anecdote, Ken Magic (also at Google) made an open-source Solitaire app [1] for Android, and I'd guess at least 1 in 5 of the (numerous) Solitaire apps in the Play Store are minor tweaks of his code with ads slapped on -- you can recognize them by the card art.

I made my own zero-permissions Solitaire app [2] and purposefully haven't open-sourced it because I would expect someone to slap ads on it. Even worse, considering that I don't have a large install base, they could probably outrank mine in the Play Store search results (granted, I don't do myself any favors by simply calling it "Solitaire").

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kmagic.sol...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.intoorbit.... (it's a built-from-scratch clone of Ken Magic's Solitaire but with vector graphics and an updated UI)

> I'd hate to see a fork of it with ads

Having seen this happen with Connectbot and others, I'm under the impression that open-sourcing Android apps isn't worth it, in spite of what your principles about software may be.

Which makes me wonder, does this happen on other platforms (iOS, BB10, WP7/8) too, or is it just Android?

How about a licence with a special clause forbidding adware and/or "privacyware"?

As long as you hold copyright, you could always offer different licensing if anyone had a genuine need for it (say re-licence under GPL for some "worthy" project, or re-sell under BSD for a price).

While certainly possible, I see two caveats here:

a) The ‘worthy project’ would have to license their product under GPL, too, which has the obvious effect that the whole thing is properly open-sourced again and everybody can slap ads on their stuff.

b) A license forbidding the modification to add advertisements is certainly not DFSG-free, and while this is likely of less concern in the Android ecosystem, I tend to measure the open-sourcness of a programme by its possible inclusion in Debian.

Ah, TeslaLED! An app that lit the way for me and my family in darkened mini-vans for quite some time (I bought the donate app, of course). It was one of the few flashlight apps that wasn't ridden with ads.

I've only recently switched to Cyanogenmod, which comes with its own built-in flashlight app, and I'm committed to not installing anything on the phone now that requires a Google login (like Google Play, for example). So no TeslaLED now.

But thanks for a great app! TeslaLED is a very well-made app, and looking at the Google Play page now, I see it has a lot of features I wasn't even aware of. Best of luck with your future apps.

Isn't there a website that gives you a direct download link for any APK in the Play store? It sounds like something that should exist...

I'dd hate to see a fork of it with ads and junk grow more popular than it.

Last time I checked, the google play store interface only broadly discriminated between for-pay and free apps. I think adding other broad categories like "open source" and "no tracking / advertising" would help to keep these fork+advertising versions from becoming popular.

Nova is the best 3rd-party launcher by far. I love your work with it.

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