I am a little wary how many of the newer apps on F-Droid seem fully vibe-coded. there's only so many 'brain training' games and 'fully offline notes' that one really needs

I wish there was a 'ranking' feature that periodically (maybe daily?) pulled down star/contributor numbers so you could at least look at projects that are more likely to receive continuing support and have basic hygiene like Dependabot alerts

that said, migrating off so many of the Google-native or phone manufacturer apps has been such a liberatory feeling. I do some community organizing in my free-time and am a huge FOSS evangelist in those spaces. there's so many similar values, namely anti-surveillance, and but for resistance to change and preference for hyperpalatable UX, it's such a natural fit

F-Droid was a blow of fresh air. Nice apps that help me do something, instead of exploding ads in my face. It's my first stop of new apps.

This. I was looking for a quick Dart board score tracker app to keep scores for family games.

The play store results were ATROCIOUS and user hostile, forcing account creation, full screen video ads and other BS.

I remembered I had f-droid and I found a perfect, no bullshit app that does exactly what I needed and no ads.

Thats the only reason for at least me to use f droid and I have for the last decade I think.

It "just works".

As opposed to play store apps requiring "play store services" meaning having to sign into play store. It refuses to do so on a FOSS principle so I am literally cut off from a lot of apps.

Aurora store helps but apps that "require play store services" don't work.

I use the Droid-ify client and rarely get issues: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/

I get the F-Droid toasts once every few weeks or so. To me, it's worth it. Finding a tolerable weather app on the Play Store is impossible nowadays. Finding one on F-Droid is easy.

I have never seen this error, and auto updates do work for me.

They are a blessing when auto updates were finally possible with the official F-Droid app.

You might consider one of the alternative front ends. Won't fix the repos being unavailable, but will fix notifications about it.

Same problem here, but only for a few apps (e.g. signal)

> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.

Many of the thing you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.

If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.

Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.

But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.

The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?

On Youtube just now I got hit with an ad whose first 5 unskippable seconds were an AI person saying "Did you know the cure for dimentia is in the Bible!?!?" - considering who that ad is targetting, Google can F off with any stance about protecting people from scams.

Android is Google's billboard/surveillance tool they've invested deeply in.

Why on earth would they let anyone else participate?

The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.

Google already allows web installs on Android, no regulation required. But yes, iOS allowing that would be excellent.