[Wonderfall]

Author here. I'm neither a GrapheneOS project member or an Accrescent developer. I'm trying to push these solutions because I think they actually do things right. It's really frustrating that the first reaction for some would be to think that my motivation is to push alternative solutions for my own benefit. Let's try to move past this and other irrelevant personal judgments.

[prophesi]

As I said, my comment wasn't to discredit the article by revealing a hidden motive. When reading any review, it's simply good to know what the reviewer's biases are. Which I would say contributing to the GrapheneOS repos, letting the GrapheneOS community proofread your article, and mentioning the project's F-Droid alternative is a proof of bias, not that it's necessarily a bad thing, but would have cleared the air if it was shown upfront.

[Wonderfall]

Well, surely there are biases in some ways, including some I may not even be conscious of. That being said, I try to follow a fact-based approach: yes, the conclusion is biased in the sense that it was written in a personal context (again, this article wasn't meant to be shared on several platforms like HN), but I can assure you the rest of the article follows this fact-based approach as much as possible. I even mention build reproducibility and Play App Signing: both mentions could be seen in favor of F-Droid (yet the reality is more nuanced than that).

I'm perfectly aware of the FOSS culture and why some want to use F-Droid to promote this. This is just not what I had in mind when writing the article. I simply intended to address some flaws or deliberate choices from F-Droid that I think are in opposition to the practical approach to modern privacy/security. It happens that I think GrapheneOS and modern Android in general follow that approach. Last month, a reddit troll tried to portrait me as a GrapheneOS developer (when I'm an occasional contributor) and used the article to explain how GrapheneOS would be "anti-FOSS". That is so wrong. GrapheneOS is FOSS at its core, and I personally value FOSS solutions. Not sure how someone would extrapolate the opposite from my article.

Knowing that, I then stumbled upon this thread and noticed people digging up random contributions in my GitHub account instead of reacting to the content. Contributing to an alternative project doesn't mean bias or endorsement. Contributing doesn't necessarily mean code, GitHub issues, or money. You could even see this article as a contribution to F-Droid in some ways (but I'm sure they're aware of the majority of the underlined issues, and I don't have the pretention to do better than them). Then again, I deeply think GrapheneOS and Accrescent are paving the way for modern FOSS solutions.