[noirscape]

Oh yeah, it's an absolutely wonderful feature. F-Droid is pretty much the main app store I'd recommend to get "the basics" from if you're ever in the unfortunate position of having to manage the mobile devices of family members. Having a maintainer "on the lookout" gives so much peace of mind. Not suddenly having the gallery app turn into a data collection machine and baiting less tech-savvy people into vaguely defined subscriptions is a value that's too good not to pass up on.

FOSS isn't really the important part for me there; it's nice, but the real value is that F-Droid is pretty much the only app store that has some reckoning on how the relationship between mobile devs and mobile customers should be far more adversarial than on any other platform due to the poor track record of mobile devs and empowers users to be able to deal with that in a way that restores some degrees of trust.

It's a fucking shame there's not an equivalent on iOS where you can just say "yeah, what you find here can be trusted" and then not have that gets polluted a year down the line. Apple used to somewhat police the App Store back in the early 2010s for similar peace of mind, but that's not the case anymore.