95
Google originally did not want to make any money from Android's app store
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
95 points (92.8% liked)
Technology
59174 readers
3167 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Is it not now? There are lots of actively-maintained apps in F-Droid, and as I understand it anything in F-Droid must at least be buildable with open source tools.
Android SDK source code is available, in theory and in theory you can build yourself. In practice binaries provided by Google come with restricting licence how you can use them while source is so scattered around weird control systems that noone knows if it's actually complete source and possible to use.
There was a project to provide FOSS builds of the SDK, but is unmaintained. https://gitlab.com/android-rebuilds/auto Debian also has android-sdk in it's repos, but 23 is the max API level now.
I don't know how F-Droid build apps today, it seems like a big problem.
I'm not sure, but F-Droid does state:
They've been pretty consistent about their requirement that everything be open source.