Guardian Project @guardianproject@librem.one

The App Fair Project has posted our thoughts on the Digital Markets Act review:
https://appfair.org/blog/gatekeeper-paradise/
#DMA #keepandroidopen #appfair

I'm honoured to have been elected to the Board of Directors of F-Droid, the most well-known #opensource alternative to the Google Play Store.

Imagine Microsoft deciding from now on what you can install on your laptop. No internet, you can only download things through the MS app store. Apps that MS has approved. Who wouldn't find that suffocating? Yet that is what Google wants to do on our Android phones (and what Apple already has - a closed ecosystem).

1/3

I am very happy to join the @fdroidorg Board of Directors for the upcoming two years.

F-Droid is in the heart of the Open Source community, which I see as a very important part of the shift away from the US big tech here in Europe. Success of Open Source on mobile is success we all can share.

F-Droid gives visibility to software developers who want to build experiences without predatory practices.

This is important.

https://f-droid.org/2026/04/28/board-appointments-2026.html

Thinking about FOSS, legal advice, and pro bono legal support.

What if there was a fund - be that from a funding body, or donations, or whatever - which paid (at reasonable rates, not Big Law Firm Prices) some lawyers to support FOSS projects.

So that it was free at point of use for those projects, but did not rely on lawyers working for free.

All outputs (subject to sorting issues to do with privilege) would be licensed under suitably open terms, with a goal of maximising re-use.

#FOSS #lawfedi

Apparently, #Google has lost track of their goal for #Android "We wanted to make sure that there was no central point of failure, where one industry player could restrict or control the innovations of any other. " https://web.archive.org/web/20120501080416/http://source.android.com/about/philosophy.html

That page is 404 Not Found now...

#KeepAndroidOpen

Privacy stalwarts in Congress just bought us a few more days to put together a bill that actually reforms Section 702. Keep pushing. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/keep-pushing-we-get-10-more-days-reform-section-702

On a train to #Dagstuhl, I finally got to read the nice write-up about on-device local-web-to-app tracking: https://localmess.github.io/assets/bridges-to-self-localmess-usenix-security-26.pdf

TL;DR summary: You might want to uninstall (or deactivate if pre-loaded) all #Facebook and #Yandex apps from your phone. That kind of behavior is pretty clearly malicious - not even just ethically wrong, but seems actually illegal (at least in the EU, though IANAL).

Google Play Integrity: what if Google dictated what software ran on your computer.

Open source implementations of attestation: what if a bunch of other people dictated what software ran on your computer.

Look, these handcuffs are permissively licensed!

No, thank you.

What if all public funding and all private donations to our efforts stop tomorrow?

Users should be fine for years thanks to the wonderful world-wide community of #chatmail relay operators 💜 Relays are dirt cheap to run. Also, our developments are much cheaper and less complex compared to what we know from comparable efforts.

No worries though!

We currently have moneys to help sustain ~15 contributors, with a sum similar to what other projects pay for their foundation president/CEO alone :)

“Meta on Thursday began removing advertisements from attorneys who were seeking clients that claim to have been harmed by social media while under the age of 18.” https://www.axios.com/2026/04/09/meta-social-media-addiction-ads