F-Droid is an app store for Android where only open source applications are available for free. It provides an alternative to the proprietary Google Play Store, which is where most Android app distribution currently takes place. Because the Google Play Store is where most users go to find and install apps, this gives Google the power to exercise control over Android app developers. In this blog post, I describe the design, mechanism and results of this control from the perspective of a long-time Android app developer.
I feel like the last bit of this article is really asking for a lot, as big of an open-source fan as I feel like most of us here are. Is a for-profit company really just going to just throw their source code on the web? I doubt it, but that’s what it would take for F-Droid to really take off.