The Future of Accrescent
blog.accrescent.appAccrescent, for those who don’t know, is an alternative android app store. They aim to compete directly with the play store, so unlike F-Droid they include both FOSS and proprietary apps. They are also very security focused. They’re still small but I find their approach interesting and their ambition worth supporting.
Unfortunately, as with many FOSS projects, funding is a challenge. If you believe they are worth supporting, please read the linked blog post.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the project in any way, just a fan trying to raise awareness.
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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They allow proprietary apps and are vulnerable to government takedown requests. No thank you.
tiktok proves that even the google and apple app stores are vulnerable to takedown requests so this is a strange condition to stand on.
You actually just proved my point better. They are all vulnerable to takedown requests except for fdroid where third party repositories can be used.
Which app store is invulnerable to takedown requests?
Fdroid. The government can ask that a app be removed from the main repository, and they would have to comply, but since you have the ability to add third-party repositories, the developer could just launch a Tor onion service and give some simple instructions, and people could continue using it, like nothing ever happened.
You realize they can just demand for it to be removed from the source repository?
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Considering you can host your own Git repository on Tor as well. Good luck with that.
Okay so which app store delivers apps exclusively over TOR?
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None of them deliver exclusively over tor. F-Droid has default tor repositories if you want to use them. And third party repositories can be tor repositories.
That’s an absolutely valid choice.
It’s not however the choice that the majority of people make. Weaning them off the play store needs an alternative with proprietary apps.
I might even be okay with having proprietary apps in it if you had to manually go and enable it and got a warning about the fact that proprietary apps could be dangerous because you don’t know what they’re doing.
By default, though, it should only show FOSS
It would be really nice if they let you have third party repositories, again with a disclaimer that it could be dangerous.
That way, they would not be subject to apt takedown requests because even if they took it down, the app developer could just launch their own onion repo and host it themselves. But instead of giving the user a warning and telling them what could go wrong, they are like, no, we’re going to make the decision for you. Therefore, I have to make the decision not to use them.
Last I heard, the intention is that users will be able to filter for open-source apps if they want.
I haven’t seen anything warning against proprietary apps specifically. As a minimum, I would hope that they implement an agreement similar to the play store where the app developers are legally bound by the privacy terms in the app description (re data, advertising, etc.). This statement could maybe include an alternative wording for OS vs Proprietary apps? Definitely something to think about.
Edit to add: I can’t comment on 3rd party repositories. Too technical for me.