Accrescent, 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 this blog post.
Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with the project in any way, just a fan trying to raise awareness.
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Why do they accept various cryptos but not OpenCollective or Liberapay or something like that? The only non-crypto option is to go through Github?
You are not the only person unhappy about this. A few people have asked for alternative payment options and they said they would look into it but nothing so far. I’ll give them another nudge.
The fact that they offer proprietary apps is a black mark in my book, and the fact that they are so security focused that they do not allow you to do third party repositories at all, which makes them extremely vulnerable to force to take down of apps by the government puts another black mark on them for me.
With F-Droid government says “take down this app” fdroid says “okay” app dev launches an onion repo and gives instructions to use it. You cant do that in accrescent
offering propriety apps is a good way to ween the dependency off of the play store, though. not everyone can meet fdroid requirements.
That’s why Izzy on droid exists. If there are apps that are not on f-droid, and you choose to enable that repository, you can still get them.
F-Droid will also never host any govt authorisation apps, or banking apps. The fact that Microg and the Aurora Store exist shows that F-Droid can’t meet everyone’s needs. De-googling doesn’t mean going completely FOSS for everyone.
As far as banking goes, you can do banking from the mobile website. You don’t need their proprietary garbage app that spies on you.
As for government authorization, there absolutely must be a way to do it without using a mobile app. Otherwise, how would senior citizens, etc… …tech illiterates, or people who don’t have devices, access government services. Governments especially have to have a way for everybody to do so.
Can’t have everything. Allowing closed-source apps gives us more choice (in theory).
In practice Accrescent has basically no apps.
They had one when I last checked (maybe a year ago) and now there’s twenty or so, so definitely seems like things are picking up.
I agree, the lack of apps is the biggest problem at the moment. In their latest blog post they’ve set out their roadmap, which is focussing a lot on improvements for app developers. I assume this is needed to convince more app developers to use them.
I’m interested to see what they can achieve if they can have someone working regularly and not just in their spare time, and I am using some apps from their store, so it makes sense for me to donate in the short to medium term. Long term I would expect a self-financing business model though.
You may want to cross-post this to !privacy@lemmy.ml as well ;)
Turns out I can only cross-post link posts, so I had to create a new post :/ It’s on there though, thanks for the suggestion.
