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Why we don't publish at the Play Store
We got some requests recently, asking, why we do not publish #dandelion at the #GooglePlay.
So here are our main reasons, why we don't plan to uploadthe app there currently.
First of all, we do not comply with Googles terms of service. Having to pay ~25€ to Google who did not write the app and does not respect your freedom nor your privacy on its platforms (Youtube, GMail...) just doesn't feel right.
We believe, that our userbase is well aware of the privacy concerns that come with using Google's Services, so many diaspora* users actually get their apps through F-Droid (which is great).
Second, if a user that does not know about F-Droid yet wants to use dandelion* and searches for it, they'll hopefully find out about the F-Droid project and may get in touch with free software that way.
So by not publishing to Google Play, we hope to get more people to understand, use and appreciate free and open source software.
If you find dandelion* on the Play Store, please be aware, that you likely just found a version built by someone else. We can not guarantee that such a version has not been tampered with in terms of #malware, so we highly discourage you to use it.
It should be clear, that we'll never charge you any money for using, downloading, sharing or modifying the app.
Note also, that we won't support those versions.
If you want to dontate to the project to support the developers, and keep them motivated, please feel free to contact us :D
As always, you can help us by submitting bug reports, code and/or translations on github and crowdin.
PS: We maintainers (@gsantner and @vanitasvitae) will soon have more time again to actively work on the app.
The last weeks we were distracted with educational work, so here is some background information:
@gsantner was working on another FLOSS app called Froody, which lets you share (naturally growing) food and other things with others. He hopes to enable people to live a more sustainable life. The main idea is to share to and help other people by e.g. sharing pears, which would rot anyway if unused.Everything is built with international use in mind.
The app is available at https://github.com/froodyapp/froody-android, and is currently available in #English, #German and #Japanese. Also translatable on Crowdin.
He also writes his bachlor thesis about Open Source and Android, which will be completed in summer and likely to be released in an appropiate free license.
@vanitasvitae is writing his bachelor thesis about an #OMEMO module for #Smack, a #XMPP library used by many free messengers like #Jitsi or #Kontalk.
He hopes to enable those messengers to #encrypt your communication end-to-end using the OMEMO protocol introduced by #conversations.
He'll also attend #FOSDEM in #brussels by the way, so if you are there you might meet him and chat a little ;)
Sharing welcome!
Tags: #dandelion #dandeliondev #diaspora #diasporaforandroid #diasporaandroid #diasporaapp #app #fdroid #freesoftware #opensource #google #play #store #app #android-dev #foss #freie-software #freesoftware #opensource #translation #translator #release #mobile #froody #froodyapp #omemo #security #sustainability #sustainable #thesis
