The future of this elegant and proven system was put in jeopardy last month, when Google unilaterally decreed that Android developers everywhere in the world are going to be required to register centrally with Google. In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents[^regid], including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.
It’s up to us, users of those FOSS apps, to collectively pour more money into the pockets of FOSS devs to make f-droid more important to their bottom line (and for a lot of FOSS apps that are also distributed on the play store, it won’t be hard to be a bigger financial input) so that when the requirement is pushed to their play store account, they feel free to decide to side with their hearts and say goodbye play store, knowing this community will keep them fed.
Time for many of us to get aquainted with the liberapay button on most app pages in f-droid.