Introduction In our previous article, we explored how Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects like F-Droid handle legal requests for user or developer data. In this post, we’re shifting focus to a broader andrapidly growing legal challenge: platform responsibility under laws like the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA), the...

This Week in F-Droid TWIF curated on Friday, 17 Oct 2025, Week 42 Community News We’ve featured Taler news before, and while reading about possibilities and what it does “in theory” sounds nice, having their apps and infrastructure to actually test and use is what everyone wants. Hence, following last...

This Week in F-Droid TWIF curated on Thursday, 09 Oct 2025, Week 41 Community News The end of tt-rss.org might be a reason to be sad. We have at least two apps that connect to such instances, TTRSS-Reader and Geekttrss, but looks like development continues at github.com/tt-rss. @linsui updates to...

Introduction In the previous article in this series, we examined how FOSS projects handle legal takedown requests. However another category of legal risk exists, one that’s often more sensitive and less visible: government requests for user or developer data. These requests can take many forms,from formal court orders and subpoenas,...

This Week in F-Droid TWIF curated on Friday, 03 Oct 2025, Week 40 F-Droid core Back in August we’ve talked about the core of our infrastructure, the servers CPUs and their age. This issue has two paths to be fixed. One in Google’s court, software side, were we’ve heard progress...

For the past 15 years, F-Droid has provided a safe and secure haven for Android users around the world to find and install free and open source apps. When contrasted with the commercial app stores — of which the Google Play store is the most prominent — the differences are...

This Week in F-Droid TWIF curated on Friday, 26 Sep 2025, Week 39 Community News We often talk about what we look at when we choose our apps, we want: freedom, privacy, security, transparency and more. With FLOSS apps we get most of those, or at least we can check,...

数字市场法（DMA）是“让数字市场更公平和更可竞争的欧盟法律”。 F-Droid强烈站队许多DMA的确保用户选择和隐私权的想法。比如： DMA有规定，确保第三方应用软件或者第三方应用软件商店能被使用：F-Droid长期以来是关心自由软件的用户们在Google Play商店之外安装应用的首选。 DMA限制看门人处理个人数据的方式：F-Droid甚至都没有账户系统。我们完全不跟踪用户。没任何个人数据需要处理。 最近呢，谷歌引入了新的开发者验证政策，和DMA相悖。该政策要求：即使一个app根本不通过Play Store安装，开发者也得向谷歌验证自己才能让app能够安装上。尽管这听起来仅仅影响app开发者，但其绝对影响最终用户的选择和自由，以一种DMA精神不具有的有害方式。 谷歌可能会争辩，说该政策是严格必要和适当的，来确保第三方软件或者应用商店不危害谷歌提供的硬件或操作系统完整性 (Article 6.4)。 这显然是假的。 信任不是通过认证开发者的法定身份来取得的。根本无法验证在Google Play发布的app有害与否，无论开发者的身份是否被谷歌认证。 信任是通过透明度取得。F-Droid用户能够验证他们要安装的app的源代码的确定性。 F-Droid从源代码构建自由软件并分发给用户，无需谷歌，这是多数Linux发行版数十年分发软件的方式。这种分发机制已经经受了时间的考验，被认为极端安全和可信，并且被全球多数现代计算机基础设施使用。 没人会说Linux发行版们需要有一个中央当局来验证app开发者才能更加安全。移动操作系统也不例外。