For context, I have been using a pretty niche OS on my phone for a long time but recently the community and the 3rd party appstores are flooded with LLM content - and fans. Its ethical, geopolitical and societal dangers are handwaved away at best, or ridiculed or countered with stupid non-arguments (“you wouldn’t tell a farmer not to use a tractor”).
Everybody is in a hurry to churn out the next pretty port of an Android app.
The actual OS devs have not taken any sort of public stance, not even in comments.
And it got me thinking. If this continues maybe LineageOS & F-Droid (no Gapps of course) might turn out to be a better alternative again, despite it being essentially Android and Not True Linux.
But how do they position themselves with AI?
If you want to suggest a 3rd option, please do so - but only if it works reliably as a daily driver - incl. telephony and messaging - on at least a small number of consumer devices that are no older than 8 years.
And only if they clearly position themselves against AI in code and generally.
I mainly use F-Droid and unfortunately I’d say a lot of the “new” and “recently updated” apps seem like they were most likely made with AI.
Idk if it’ll be easy to find an open source app store that completely restricts AI content, because that means somebody would have to be manually monitoring it and investigating each project that’s uploaded, which most OSS doesn’t have the capacity for.
the F-Droid repository IzzyOnDroid has pretty good AI policy. (#)
oh thank fuck, the amount of vibecoded slop and AI features was starting to annoy me on FDroid.
I’m not sure what compromise I would strike if I was in their position, but I don’t like how everybody in IT basically accepts that some AI usage is fine.
I know why and I don’t want to argue about it.
It just makes me sad: “ethical arguments aside, you have to admit that there is some benefit…”
What people used to say about Google. Took over a decade to discover that maybe these things they “put aside” for something that delivers convenience for free, were pretty important after all.
Definitely agree with you, but as I said originally, OSS doesn’t really have the capacity to tackle this stuff… You can’t say “we have no AI apps” if you don’t have a way to constantly be checking and guaranteeing that.
However, if this is really a major problem for you, maybe try contributing to a project you like? Look for AI apps and send take-down requests to the devs of the app store you found them on.
Might not be the simplest solution, but as the saying goes, “be the change you want to see in the world”.
Huge parts of society rely on mostly unenforceable honor rules and it works. Never 100% of course, but it does.
Thanks but I was thinking about their actual policy, regarding.
I don’t think we have to go that far just yet.
Speaking from experience, there’s quite a bit of self-policing within such communities; a clear positioning from the project helps a lot.