Notices by Sylvia (sylvielorxu@chaos.social)

It's so frustrating to see Microsoft copy inventions from the Linux world and act like they're new. Ads in the start menu? Come on, we had that in Ubuntu back in 2012 already, you're late to the party *again*.

@Codeberg I have a script which automatically collects users who made at least 5 commits and adds them to the about screen. It's not perfect, but because I use Weblate in Catima it does mean that translators are included too.

I also try to say thanks to all MRs, but sadly a lot of tooling doesn't have direct ways of contacting people so I can't thank everyone but I try :)

German tech news company @heiseonline wrote about loyalty card apps in their third issue of C't 2023.

Does any of you recognize that little icon in the bottom-right of the smart phone screenshot? That's right, that's Catima!

In the article, Heise explicitly names Catima as a good privacy-friendly alternative to other popular apps like Stocard and FidMe worth checking out.

This marks the first time Catima is named in mainstream media, an awesome milestone!

#Android #Fdroid #Catima #privacy

Catima 2.23.1 is out, with the new UI redesign.

I hope y'all will like it.

It's already out at IzzyOnDroid and will soon make its way to F-Droid and Google Play.

Nice, #Catima is popular enough for cloned versions with the copyright info illegally stripped and advertisement and tracking added to start appearing on the "well-moderated" #GooglePlay store.

It's kinda hilarious to me, because the About screen also contains the privacy policy. Which means that these apps removing the About screen are already breaking Google Play policy by not having a clear privacy policy inside the app.

Of course, I've reported the clone to Google. Not expecting much though... seeing multiple such apps on this dev's profile.

Unbelievable. Someone literally stole my app and removed the copyright screen and added ads, I showed clear examples and even stated that all the activity names are the exact same and Google says they "couldn't identify a violation"? Ridiculous.

TIL: HDMI is actually quite a closed system and the HDMI Forum has successfully blocked AMD from supporting 120Hz @ 4K in their Open Source drivers because they disallow Open Source implementations of (that part of) the standard.

I see a lot of people talk about "just use DisplayPort" because it is supposedly more open, but I can't find much about that when searching the web. Does anyone here know more about that? Got some good sources? Should I ensure all new stuff I buy has DisplayPort?

I get so tired of people complaining when an Open Source app has paid features.

What should the devs do instead? Starve? So they can't improve the app at all anymore?

If you want all your apps to be free, it's time to start fighting for things like UBI (Universal Basic Income) so developers don't NEED to sell app stuff to be able to stay alive.

@ploum @LenticularCloud @aaribaud @protonmail IzzyOnDroid is not F-Droid. When you add a third party repository to F-Droid, you get apps directly from that repository without *any* checks from F-Droid.

Izzy is pretty trustworthy, his repo grabs apps straight from GitHub/GitLab/etc. of the developers, but there are no checks if the .apk file matches the source code in question and apps may contain proprietary code.

But yeah, Proton Mail is not in F-Droid. It is in IzzyOnDroid. Not the same.

@ploum @LenticularCloud @aaribaud @protonmail I mean, if you use the IzzyOnDroid repository you trust @IzzyOnDroid to pull it in from the official source and not do anything weird :)

I personally do trust him a lot and I think he has a well-deserved reputation of trustworthiness after years of running IzzyOnDroid.

For context, his website on https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/ch.protonmail.android states the .apk file comes from https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-mail-android

Okay, this is officially the dumbest reason anyone ever gave Catima a 1 star review.

Not being able to find a feature that already exists that I put a huge button for happens every now and then, but that's forgiveable, because I'm not an UX expert and I'm probably building my app flow in a slightly confusing way.

But using some permission viewer and screaming an app is insecure because it *exports a permission to ensure other apps need to ask permission to access your data* is just stupid.

Don't shower for too long, we need to preserve water so Bing AI can be cooled while giving dangerously incorrect answers

Bad news

#Google finally released more info about their new #GooglePlayPolicies:

Personal accounts must give Google legal name, legal address, email and phone number.

Google will publish legal name, country and email for developers.

Organization accounts must give the above info and a D-U-N-S number.

Google will publish legal name, address, email and phone number for organization accounts.

Google is effectively going to dox every single trans dev on #GooglePlay.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/13628312

It seems #Google's war against #ThirdPartyAppStores has escalated to abusing #GooglePlayProtect to spread #FUD about them.

Someone in the #FDroid chat posted an image about being warned that #Droidify can track them.

While getting a list of installed apps could be used to detect e.g. sexual orientation (if a gay dating app is installed), it is much more minor than the tracking many apps on Google Play actively do. Yet, it allows Google to mark all third party app stores as dangerous.

"Why is this feature still not added? It could be done in a few hours" is one of the most annoying things you can say to an Open Source dev.

But okay, let's say you're right and it's "just a few hours" (shall we say 2?). Then there's still more than 50 other open issues, if they're all "simple" and "just a few hours" that's at least 100 hours worth of work of things. Everyone claims their request matters most.

Also, am I allowed to, you know, have a life besides my side projects? Please?

I'm actually wondering... if killing your own species (human as human) is homocide, does that mean killing another species is heterocide? Somehow I can't find the word heterocide in the dictionary.

And why is it suicide, not autocide? Is that a Latin vs. Greek thing?