Mindful App Installation with F-droid

In this session, we are going to perform an everyday activity that we all do without thinking: install an app. But this time, we will pause at every step along the way and observe what exactly is happening behind the scenes. This talk is aimed at anybody who wants to gain more control over the apps they use and prior technical knowledge is not needed.

The session will introduce F-Droid, the community-moderated FOSS app store. F-Droid apps tend to be well designed and without privacy-invading technology like trackers. During the course of this session, the audience will get to install an app of their choice from this selection. We will also provide a hands-on introduction of the "anti-features" flags in F-Droid allow users to make an informed choice about apps having features that they may not like such as trackers or centralised servers.

As one of the speakers is a board member of F-Droid, we will also leave some time at the end for questions regarding the governance of the F-Droid project.

Note: This is designed to be an interactive session. Attendees are expected to follow along on their own phones by installing F-droid and selecting an app of their choice to install from there. Those who do not have an Android phone or do not have enough space to install apps are requested to sit next to people who do. The apps can be uninstalled after the session concludes.

• Google and Apple are not the only option: community-run app stores can serve as a trusted source for obtaining apps. F-Droid is a source for well designed FOSS app without the bloatware

• You don't need to have a technical background to make informed choices about the apps you use. F-Droid makes this easy by being transparent about "anti-features" you may want to avoid.

• Keep Android Open: Google is making it more complicated to set up app stores through long timeouts and scary warnings. Understand where these warnings come from and in which situations it is safe to ignore them.

• How you can help: help your friends and family cross the initial barrier of setting up F-Droid itself. Then, sit back and let them enjoy!

(Note to organisers: Keep Android Open is a big topic and not possible to cover in detail here. We noticed somebody else has submitted a talk on that topic, if it is accepted, then we will stick to a brief summary and direct people to that talk for details)