Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

#Google trips over its own words, when they sell you #Android it's the best computing device in the world that does everything. After you bought it Google doesn't let you do anything *you* want to.

#Sideload is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.

What Do You Talk About When You Talk About Sideloading?

What does Google?

Here's #FDroid: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/28/sideloading.html

@ret @eighthave Now, following that, the legal post pertains to any #FDroid repository in general, but we can only speak for "f-droid.org repo" since this is the one we admin, is currently the biggest (by volume) and users usually refer to it by saying "F-Droid".

@ret @eighthave F-Droid (the word) is many things: a repo client, a repo software, a repomaker and an actual apps repo. The "f-droid.org repo" is centralized (w/ mirrors), yes, by its nature of being controlled by the repo admin.

When we say decentralized we mean that: you can use any F-Droid client with any F-Droid app repository out there.

Users are fed the notion of "there can be only one app store", be it from Apple or Google, and find it hard to grasp the idea of what #FDroid can do.

🏛️ We have just arrived at @Curia!
💼 Today, our lawyer, Dr. Martin Husovec, will explain to the court why #DMA #interoperability should apply to #Apple in full extent!

👀 Stay tuned for updates! And if you need a quick recap of what's at stake for #FreeSoftware in this case, have a read here: https://fsfe.org/news/2025/news-20251015-01.en.html

What time it is? It's 5 o'clock... somewhere. So here comes the fifth #FDroid legal post.

It's all about content, transparency, and user protections. It features strong tags like #OnlineSafetyAct #Ofcom #DSA and #DMA and how these shape our own policies.

Will this break some prejudice? One way to find out: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/21/navigating-the-digital-markets-act-digital-services-act-and-the-online-safety-act.html

@nobody The FSF is a fiscal sponsor of the Guix project, together with Guix Foundation, but the FSF does not contribute per se to Guix development (even less so now that the project no longer uses FSF infra).

@signalapp @eighthave

I'm glad it was AWS that was down and not a sovereign cloud, imagine the consequences.

What a timing: while I'm sitting at a #CloudAbolition workshop, #AWS takes down major centralised services like #Signal, #WhatsApp and #Teams.

People continue happily texting me on @matrix though 💚

🔞 Platforms have no excuse to continue practices that put children at risk.

We’ve asked Snapchat, YouTube, Apple App Store and Google Play for more information on the measures they have in place to protect minors.

This is the first investigatory step after the adoption of the Guidelines on the Protection of Minors, now also available in all EU languages and in a child- and parent-friendly version.

More → https://link.europa.eu/gNT3qK

When we say #OpenSource, we mean business. That's why ALL Tuta apps are published on @fdroidorg

While Google & Apple monitor all push notifications, your data is safe when choosing Tuta Mail. 🔒

➡️ Learn why Tuta Mail is the only email provider app on F-Droid: https://tuta.com/blog/open-source-email-fdroid

#FOSS #Fdroid #Android #deGoogle

'The people who make our lives more difficult arrive in private jets, not dinghies.'

@matthew_d_green A lot of that discussion is currently happening in scope of the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDIW) framework. Most people in these discussions are acutely aware of the far-reaching effects of all the associated nuances, with many of them remaining hard to predict. So we are pushing hard for the most privacy-preserving architecture we can come up with.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, e.g. on pseudonyms and the properties they should have: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05419v1

@me @fsf @fsfe This is important work, and a key piece of the puzzle for freeing our mobile devices. The other key is making it a right to unlock the bootloader and replace the operating system on devices that we own. Without that, all those users are still stuck on Android even if a perfect alternative exists. We believe this should be the next thing that the #DigitalMarketAct (#DMA) addresses.

https://librephone.fsf.org/

Free the last bits of "anything Android"?

My positive thought about this is that #PostmarketOS and #MobileLinux in general will profit from any public knowledge about hardware it could run on.

If I understood correctly the money for doing the work on the #Android blobs is donated by John Gilmore. His Money, his decision where to put it. And there is a positive effect, but there is also a negative one:

Android is based on ideas by #Google. To free it we'd need to fork it and adopt it to different ideals and goals. Android is designed to maximize the profit of Google.

It is not designed with the users well-being and interests as the primary goal.

Just replacing blobs in Android keeps the ecosystem the same, promotes Google and their goals and leaves the control over design decisions for Android in Googles hands.

Once a device is freed by hard work of a few engineers it will be old, it will be uninteresting for people looking at Android and the latest shiny hardware running it.

But still - Mobile Linux will make good use of those devices as free OSes in general do when it comes to hardware left behind by commercial OSes.

@fsf@hostux.social @fsfe@media.fsfe.org