Ask HN: Why Free software community haven't mobile app publishing organization?

2 points by selamtux 10 years ago | 2 comments

Hi folks,

As free software developers around the world we can publish/distribute our free/open source projects as many forms, like language package (pythons's pip, perls' cpan, node's npm and such) or as source code form (with github, sourceforce, even self hosted) or as binary. even some volunteers doing packaging our project's for us to more easly distribute (deb, rpm, exe and many other packaging systems)

But, we dont have any option to publish our mobile free/open softwares except our self to make payment for mobile app platforms (like ios, android, etc.) (specially for ios, we can distribute our software's as apk our selfs but there is a marketing and trust issue for this option)

So, why we dont create an open/free software publishing organization? they can obtain to developer keys for all mobile platforms and they can build our softwares from source code and published to mobile markets.

i believe mobile development platform companies can give access to their machines (one or two) to build softwares developed with their tech.

and free/open platforms, organizations (like open source community) can make some little donation to this organizastion for expensives (money or machines or code review stuff).

And ofcourse all source code has to be reviewed for some bad code like collecting user information to remote servers and/or advertising sdk's before the build and/or publish.

so what you think? do we need such this organization? if we have, can we make it?

Zuider 10 years ago |

F-Droid provides a curated list of FOSS apps for Android which can be installed via the F-Droid app.

https://f-droid.org/about/

It would be a lot more complicated to provide a similar service for iOS.

selamtux 10 years ago | |

even f-droid not in play.google, ofcourse FOSS community can use f-droid (or similar solutions) or self hosted apk's, but we already choose FOSS in our daily basis life (i'm choose if there is a libre version of some app event doesnt have same functionality with closed one, i use libre version), my offer brings more FOSS to mobile world with some guarenteed like this software can not contain spyware, malware, adware such and published most used market places (for android play.google and for ios app store, etc.)

there is a big expensives in mobile development cycle if we compare the desktop/embed platforms. we have million softwares as libre/open but not in mobile world with same quality and amount.