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by mycoborea 2848 days ago
Does the App Store for either iOS or macOS give any indication whether or not an application is open source?

I know that is not at all a guarantee that an app would be more respectful of the user's privacy, but I'd bet that it would save a chunk of guesswork.
3 comments
MBCook 2848 days ago
No, not that I’m aware of. And I think that would be meaningless to 99.8% of users. It’s not like you can filter your searches anyway.

If people DID start thinking of it as some kind of sealer quality, unscrupulous actors would simply open source their apps and leave all the garbage in. So it would become meaningless.

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jsjohnst 2848 days ago
Further, what does it being open source help? They could publish the app source without the tracking SDKs (especially as some of them are big enough now that you have to hassle with git-lfs even if you wanted to commit it) and then build it with the tracking SDKs before submitting to the App Store.
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wruza 2848 days ago
Other people could build these apps at build farm and publish under trusted vendor name like linux distributions do. You don’t trust vim.deb from anyone, but e.g. vim.org and ftp.??.debian.org/debian have at least strictly no intent to abuse you.
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jsjohnst 2848 days ago
You realize we are talking about iOS / the App Store, right?
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snaky 2848 days ago
Apple has removed GPL-licensed apps from their store.
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yoz-y 2848 days ago
No but open source apps will usually tell you in their description.
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