Watching from the sidelines as a LOS ROM user, I’m disappointed by the replies from the devs. From mischaracterizing surprise, anger and generally negative feedback as positive praise to completely ignoring the two main asks of the community. For me, there are other red flags, but I’ll leave it alone.

Ego seems to be coming into play here, and the repeated references to GrapheneOS seem to reinforce that. Handwaving new and unique criticism as if it is a continuation of an older conflict is pretty poor form.

The basic issue as I see it (as a non-user of their platform) is to market your OS the way they do while also adding this feature without notice or explanation. Their claim that they want to stay relevant and include popular features is a straw man. There are other ways to implement it, and other ways to introduce it to the community. But that’s not relevant. Their explanation could be used to justify abandoning their stayed objective of anti-big tech in any/all ways. Saying people want big corporate tech features is weak and obviously not in parity with the stated mission of privacy-first.

It’s not always the poor choices that sink user trust; sometimes it’s a tone deaf response or unexplained motives, or opaque financial incentive structure.

Sometimes it’s all of the above. This seems to be one of those cases.

Ty @Luffy879 for sharing.

I got sick of GP when they announced AI learning on user photos (or actually that’s just the last straw). I use a combination of these two apps now:

https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fossify.gallery/

https://f-droid.org/packages/io.ente.photos.fdroid/