this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Google originally did not want to make any money from Android's app store (www.androidauthority.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Or when it was actually possible to make an app for Android using open source tools?

Is it not now? There are lots of actively-maintained apps in F-Droid, and as I understand it anything in F-Droid must at least be buildable with open source tools.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Android SDK source code is available, in theory and in theory you can build yourself. In practice binaries provided by Google come with restricting licence how you can use them while source is so scattered around weird control systems that noone knows if it's actually complete source and possible to use.

There was a project to provide FOSS builds of the SDK, but is unmaintained. https://gitlab.com/android-rebuilds/auto Debian also has android-sdk in it's repos, but 23 is the max API level now.

I don't know how F-Droid build apps today, it seems like a big problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I'm not sure, but F-Droid does state:

We cannot build apps requiring Non-Free build tools, including Oracle’s JDK or some pre-release toolchains.

They've been pretty consistent about their requirement that everything be open source.