 just downloaded fdroid for the first time in a while. it seems incredibly developer hostile. this "anti-feature" thing has its heart in the right place but it seems like software purity culture cranked to 11. - communicating with a non-open source endpoint (a podcast app got dinged for this because it uses the iTunes index) there are valid reasons for all these things. an app should not be dinged for it. if it's truly bad, take it down. 18 comments
present day me would improve this layout quite a bit but the past is the past. i was tired and was paying through the nose to make these designs for free. i got an A minus lmao @samhenrigold there's also NeoStore: https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Store The UI is not great, but I like it a lot more than FDroid, plus you can add other package sources. @samhenrigold I agree, the anti features in F-Droid are nerd things that don't matter to many of its users, but then again, the dark pattern labels in your screenshots would also be almost useless on F-Droid - because I never once encountered an app there that exibits any of them. For F-Droid such things are not an anti-feature to mention in the catalog, they are reason to never include an app with them in the catalog in the first place. @grishka smh. roughly 100% of endpoints that an app would need to enable features are closed source. that “anti feature” makes NO sense to me.  @grishka @samhenrigold moshidon doesnt have that anti feature and does talk to FCM, maybe look into it @samhenrigold @grishka sorry, is this the mastodon app itself? because yeah I can see them putting a flag for the joinmastodon.org non free service.  @lucasmz @grishka @samhenrigold Moshidon can't do push notifications though. At least not on my phone.  @Codeschubse @grishka @samhenrigold it works fine for me. Maybe you're using a broken UnifiedPush setup? ntfy.sh hardly works. @samhenrigold they're valid, they're trying to build a fully FOSS ecosystem, they still allow these apps, they are just marked as these. There's also third party repos like IzzyOnDroid, but F-Droid itself has a mission to push for FOSS, and that's kind of it. I see why. Most people don't even look too closely into these anti feature tags, but some people do like to know this kind of thing, hence these flags are nice to have. lucasmz, in search results, apps with anti-features lack the install button in the list, requiring an extra click. This feels intentional.  @grishka @samhenrigold it probably is. i can see this being a way to let the user know there are anti-features before an install which makes sense  @samhenrigold @jascha as a user I absolutely love F-Droid for being strict. I get that the developer side is hostile. I really do. I'm not saying your post does not matter. I'm just saying: this hostility has value on the consumer side of things. To me, I would even say *great* value. I don't know any other place where I can be reasonably relaxed when downloading apps. I totally take a look at Anti-Feature Flags. And if they make sense for the app in question, I'm totally fine with it. |
Gregory's Server
all of those anti features are nerd things that don't matter. i did this in my freshman year of college, it's sort of a play on apple's “privacy nutrition label" thing but for dark patterns.
this would be wayyyy more valuable than what they currently do, which is slap a label on a listing with “the upstream source code includes proprietary software”