Personally, ever since I heard of this store, I’ve not been interested. It just seems like another Google Play to me.
I understand that the developers have done some things to enhance the security such as app certificate pinning and such, but I cannot get over the fact that it’s a single source that any government can contact and pull down an app from.
I personally stick with fdroid because if they are forced by governments to pull down an app the app dev can launch their own onion repo without asking permission.
I don’t think they’re aiming to replace F-Droid. Rather think of this as a tool to wean the masses off the play store. It’s also an alternative for those people currently using microg and Aurora Store.
Personally I have some proprietary apps that I don’t want to be without. If Accrescent could provide them, I could finally delete my google account. I literally just have an account to download apps.
You do not need a Google account to download apps. May I introduce you to the Aurora store. You can download it from fdroid and you can use an anonymous account to download apps with it.
Edit: I clearly did not read your comment closely enough. If you already have the Aurora store, then why do you need a Google account? I haven’t had one in like two years and didn’t use the one I had for years before that.
You can’t download paid apps through the Aurora store.
Guess it’s a good thing I’m a cheap motherfucker then. If an app has a price tag next to it, I don’t use it. Now if an app is open source and they ask me to donate to it, I’m willing to do that.
Why not both? ;)
Some FOSS apps are only available for a fee in the play store and I think that’s great. They’re able to access a bigger market for funding purposes, and we both know the vast majority of play store users won’t make the effort to figure out how to make donations otherwise.
I believe OSMAnd is in the Play Store, but costs money. But if you get it from fdroid, it’s free. And I’m okay with that, because I use fdroid.
Precisely, that’s what I meant. Different market segments need different approaches.
And fdroid is working very diligently on reproducible builds. Which is unique in the app distribution landscape.
I understand the premise that you don’t want to trust a third party if you don’t have to. But I also don’t trust the developers to publish the source code correctly either. At least fdroid keeps everyone honest with the code being available.
Tldr:
in order for Accrescent to continue advancing, we need $5,800/month in recurring donations to fund its full-time development.
We are currently receiving $112 each month in recurring donations.
We are currently spending $53.53/month on our services.
We recently discovered that an unprecedented Monero donation of ~$16,062.50 was received in the short time after we totaled the latest values for this article but before it was posted.
Because this is a significant donation, we will be posting an update on our social media accounts soon about what this means for the project
Update: They’ve released a roadmap.
They have a fixed plan for the next 3 months, mostly back-end improvements for app developers.
Longer term plans are listed in order of priority but without a time line, it depends on how much of their funding goal they reach.
Current funding on Github shown at 10% of goal.
