The only app I can’t live without. Except for gboard, all of my applications are Foss. There is no competition for gboard’s swipe typing, not to mention its many capabilities like as searching for gifs, stickers, being able to paste copied images, translating, and so on. I’d like to know how I can use gboard while maintaining my privacy. According to what I’ve heard, it sends all typing data to Google’s server. If you ask me, that’s a massive no-no. Do you have any suggestions?

  • @milicent_bystandr@lemm.eeEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    I read through that article, and though I don’t have the time or knowledge to properly critique it, I found quite a lot of it unconvincing.

    It’s one thing to agree there are potential issues, but the article seemed to jump a bit too easily, via rhetoric more than logic, to “therefore it’s unsuitable” and similarly to “the other ones are better”.

    (Disclaimer: I only know mildly what I’m talking about!! If whoever reads this is interested, I hope you can follow the details to their source and get involved in the proper discussion for improving f-droid and/or encouraging another respiratory client.)

    • @argv_minus_one@beehaw.orgEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      A tempting idea would be to compare F-Droid to the desktop Linux model where users trust their distribution maintainers out-of-the-box (this can be sane if you’re already trusting the OS anyway), but the desktop platform is intrinsically chaotic and heterogeneous for better and for worse. It really shouldn’t be compared to the Android platform in any way.

      This is, quite frankly, borderline misinformation. Malicious packages in Linux distributions are unheard of. Malicious apps in the allegedly-more-secure Google Play, on the other hand, are a dime a dozen.

      The downplaying of the importance of reproducible builds further diminishes my opinion of this piece.

      I’m going to go ahead and continue using F-Droid, thanks.