It’s remarkable that you took the time to write this essay just to reply to that post. Thank you for the effort and your insights, it was very interesting to read and I’m glad I stumbled across it!

I don’t think so, F-Droid should not be viewed as a play store replacement for the masses. I would instead consider it an opinionated store / repository for apps that have to fulfil some pretty strict criteria. This makes it a great resource, and a good complementary resource, because that allows them to be picky and stick to their values. And it enables people that don’t mind the trade-offs to restrict themselves to F-Droid without having to research every app themselves, if they want to.

Most general users would hate the idea of dealing with multiple app stores, but I think some fragmentation like this would have some benefits as well. Note, for example, that F-Droid does not focus on quality of apps: There are lots of little projects that maybe don’t look super polished or are in early development, etc., and that is great. But there could just as well be another App Store focusing exclusively on high quality, feature-rich apps, while taking a more lenient stance on open source code and it being free. Or whatever kind of focus you want to place.

Then again, this could be achieved with a good search function and filters as well. In the end, what F-Droid offers is more choice a better place for apps that Google decided to ban from their play store for strategic reasons.

That sounds like some bug that should not occur and would of course be painfully annoying. The main advantage of it are the apps it provides, though. Some of them are not available in the play store (like NewPipe, a very good YouTube app without adverts, if that is still around). It is also a good place to start if you are looking for some new app for a specific feature, mainly because it consists of free, open source apps and you don’t have to sift through loads of low quality software that is riddled with ads, collects as much data as possible, or requires some obscene subscription fee, if all you wanted was a flashlight or whatever.

I didn’t read too much into it, but roughly speaking: Because the technology by design aggregates data immediately and drops any personal identifiers/ the unaggregated data in the process. Other companies can build whatever they want on that, but if done properly, it is impossible to reconstruct user-specific data points and profile the users that way.

This type of privacy-preserving aggregation technique is not new, it is fairly common for things like demographic data, where you want to know things like population density and incomes for some area, without just publishing an exact address with corresponding income for every person (as an example).

Edit: I think I missed your point a little bit. I am unsure, but it seemed that Anonymous is responsible for designing the framework, not doing any tracking (i.e. it wouldn’t necessarily be “put all trust into them collecting it”). Maybe rolling out that technology could be done in a way of blocking other tracking, or maybe it is intended as a basis for regulations to take up. Maybe someone else can give more informed input on that.

I think IPv4+ is what you’re thinking of

Things like FiveM exist, which is exactly that. I’m not sure if that is at all affected by the anticheat though, I didn’t read the article.

There are many ways to contribute. I actually read an article about that a couple of days ago, maybe it will be of interest to you, too: https://github.com/readme/featured/open-source-non-code-contributions

This is a rather specific question, but can you cast audio from arbitrary apps to WiFi speakers from your Pixel? Similar to airplay on iOS (if that’s what it is called)?