Has anyone noticed that apps on F-Droid or that you just get from GitHub are just better than the ultra-popular apps on the play store? Most of them are open source and have no ads or trackers. But this isn’t true on the Play Store at all.
I see myself always getting apps from F-Droid now because there is always an alternative to the ad-infested bloated privacy infesting BS that I find on the play store. It’s unfortunate that it’s gotten this bad, where the only reason I even use the play store is to install updates or games.
Getting your app published on Google Play is fairly easy. You basically just upload an APK and with how little Google reviews apps, you can get almost anything published. F-Droid on the other hand has very strict standards (which is a good thing). Since I published an app myself on F-Droid, I can tell you that fulfilling those standards does take a lot of effort, and thus a lot of love from the developer.
This creates a filter: If you care enough about your project to go the extra mile to fulfil the F-Droid requirements, you probably also care about making a good product. If you don’t, you also won’t be motivated enough to publish on F-Droid. There are countless open-source projects which sort-of work but are left behind, usually because it was someone’s side-project. This is ok as well, because it’s free time that most people are spending on Open-Source projects, but as a result, most open-source projects are actually not very mature. They just never make it onto F-Droid and don’t go viral.