Be in Google Play

[CharmCityCrab]

What is the user problem or growth opportunity you want to see solved?

The vast majority of Android users exclusively download their apps from the Google Play Store. That is what they use both for app discovery, and in some cases the only store they trust to vet apps. It also has the advantage of being pre-loaded onto all or almost all the major Android phones and devices out of the box.

While I agree that the nature of this browser and it's appeal to power-users makes being in F-Droid equally or more important (Which is it's own issue here in the Github), I do not think being in Google Play and in F-Droid are mutually exclusive options. IceWeasel could be in both.

Who will benefit from it?

IceWeasel and both current and potential IceWeasel users would benefit in the following ways:

1. More overall users would adopt IceWeasel as the browser's discoverability would be increased and the user friction relevant to the process of installing the browser would be deceased for some users (As we probably all know, the more obstacles in people's way, and the more they are asked to do things they don't normally do, on the road to doing things they don't find of overwhelming importance, the more likely they are to not do it. Some users give up at every stage. If it's easy to do, and follows a familiar pattern they are comfortable with, on the other hand, they are more likely to do it on a whim.).

2. Increased user choice. In some respects, IceWeasel is the user-choice browser in terms of all the options that are present and being expanded every day within the browser, it's access to a broad extension library, and so on and so forth. If we extend that principle to things that aren't directly about the process of using the software, allowing users the ability to choose to download and get updates from the store or repository of their choice is very compatible with the goals of the product. Users could choose their favorite store between F-Droid and Google Play, or choose to manually download APKs.

3. Potentially more developers, to the extent that some developers start as users and then begin to feel invested and submit pull requests and otherwise get more involved. The browser is likely to get more developers per number of users from F-Droid than Google Play, but since the browser can be both places, it's not a contest (Also, if it were a contest, which it isn't, it could be pointed out that if more overall users come from Google Play, we might get more actual developers from there, even if we are getting fewer developers as a percentage of users from there.) .

4. Having a Plan B. There is always the potential that the interests and requirements of a store/marketplace/repo and a browser or app could diverge in unanticipated ways due to unanticipated changes to any one of a variety of external and internal factors. If IceWeasel limits itself to only F-Droid (or only Google Play, for that matter), all of it's eggs are in one basket and it would have to rebuild from people downloading APKs and potentially an eventual belated listing elsewhere should it ever find itself no longer eligible to be in the one store that people would be getting it from. Being as close to "everywhere" as is prudent isn't a bad idea in that respect.

Granted, there is some maintenance cost to each additional store, and I don't know if being in, say, the Amazon.com Android Marketplace, is worth the hassle (Though it might be). However, Google Play represents a lot of users and I think probably is worth the hassle (Granted, I don't know the details of that process, so it could be more of a hassle than I imagine.). Between Google Play, F-Droid, and APKs, the project could be reasonably said to be serving almost everyone, even though it may not be in some random small app stores that may be out there.

[abhijitvalluri]

I have released apps on the play store before and if we are interested in doing this I am happy to help.

I wonder in terms of legality etc. I mean it is an open source app and so it is probably okay but we need to be certain about it and get some clear and accurate information of whether it is acceptable to publish a forked version to Google Play and what steps need to be taken to achieve it.

[CharmCityCrab]

I see plenty of forked browsers on Google Play including, but not limited to, the following forks of Chromium:

Vivaldi, Brave, Kiwi Browser (Not updated since 2019, but listed), Microsoft Edge, and Opera (The latter at minimum uses the Blink rendering engine these days, I haven't looked into that one more closely).

Firefox forks are harder to come by, however Tor Browser is a major one that's on there (Although I do kind of wonder if obtaining Tor through Google Play is missing the point of using Tor. ;) ). DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser appears as though it could be a fork of Firefox (I spent about 5 minutes fiddling with it one day. I didn't look very closely.). Ad-Block Plus used to offer an Android Browser that was definitely a fork of Fennec Firefox, but I don't see it listed any longer in it's original form (There's some sort of collaboration with Samsung listed now, which isn't what I remember.). Waterfox has been listed on Google Play a couple of times, but has been pulled, likely due to very poor reviews, combined with a lack of person-power hours (For many years they only had one person to maintain the desktop browser [Though, interestingly, in the early years, a lot of Mozilla employees directly contributed patches without formally joining the team.], and when they got bought out by a corporation, they added a second person to work on it.) to maintain and fix the fork (Speculation on my part, though I saw the bad reviews). Pale Moon had an Android browser some time ago, but I am not sure if it was listed or not (The others mentioned were definitely listed at different points in time), and their specific reasons stated for discontinuing it were needing to devote more time to their desktop product and a lack of proficiency in Android coding.

My back of the envelope inexpert legal thinking (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet) is that if the project considers legal issues a concern here, the project may want to do the following:

1. Get as many specific references containing the words "Firefox" and "Mozilla" as possible out of the code, and especially the user-facing product, except where they may have to be included or mentioned to comply with open-source licenses or to allow the browser to operate in the case of hard to excise code or dependencies that require a specific name. Issue #74 is an example of what I mean by references within the user-facing product (There is at least one other menu item like that, and possibly some stuff that may display on first-install like Firefox Sync).

2. Don't mention Firefox or Mozilla in the Google Play Store listing text at all unless the GPS specifically asks the project to disclose what it is a fork of. If either absolutely must be mentioned for whatever reason, include a lengthy disclaimer that this is separate independent project not authorized by Mozilla and that it is not Firefox, even though it may share some open-source code. This would be for perceived legal protection against potential trademark claims by Mozilla or Firefox, not to be jerks to Mozilla or Firefox.

3. If the project is being renamed or rebranded to something other than Iceweasel (See issue #36 ), we may want to do it now (or at least before a Google Play submission). The project doesn't actually own the rights to the Iceweasel name and logo. If anyone does, it would be Debian Linux. Fortunately, Debian created the name and logo in part specifically because they didn't feel Firefox met it's open-source standards with it's "non-free" logo artwork and such. So, Debian is unlikely to sue the project. That doesn't mean that they don't have the legal right to. It also doesn't necessarily mean that Google Play wouldn't see this as a legal conflict and reject our submission.

All that said, I don't personally consider any of these to be blockers. They're just things to get in order if the project wants to be extra careful.

The project is already self-publishing APK files and in the process of getting into F-Droid. I don't see what the legal difference would be between F-Droid and Google Play. Practically, GP does mean more exposure which may trigger something from someone, but there is already clear evidence that Mozilla is aware that this project exists. If it felt it had a trademark claim it had to defend (If a company knows of things that violate it's trademarks and doesn't take action, it risks losing the exclusive legal rights to them in certain cases.), the lead developer would have a letter from Mozilla legal in his mailbox already.

As far as Google Play listing criteria go, there is ample evidence that they allow renamed forks of popular web browsers with new logos IMO.

As with any project, this one could use a legal department, but, as with most projects of this nature (Small, no revenue streams, no physical offices, not incorporated or registered as a business or a non-profit, an all-volunteer workforce, etc..), it is unlikely to be able to afford one. The key is, I think, brand differentiation, and the open-source licensing (i.e. Making sure no one could reasonably assume the project is maintained by Mozilla or is an authorized version of Firefox, and sticking to code that is clearly open source and used in accordance with it's licensing or that the project has been directly granted a non-exclusive license to use.).

[interfect]

It would be cool to be in Google Play, but I'm personally not interested in paying the developer fees (are there fees?) and risking my Google account being banned because Google decided they didn't like something about the app. So someone else would probably have to own the listing.

We definitely want to wait until any rebranding is done, and squash any branding bugs we can find where links to Mozilla stuff peek through. I think we probably also want to wait until F-Droid is sorted out.

I'm not on my actual dev machine at the moment, but I'll see about opening some sort of branding poll to settle that.

[CharmCityCrab]

It would be cool to be in Google Play, but I'm personally not interested in paying the developer fees (are there fees?)

I found some details on on Google's site:

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/6112435

If I am reading it correctly, there is a one-time $25 registration fee.

[abhijitvalluri]

Yes, I can confirm that it is a one-time $25 fee. I have done that already a long time ago to publish my own apps. Since I have done this already before I can help if needed. But I am a little hesitant to do it via my personal account because then this will be published under my developer name which is odd and unfair to the those who helped work on this. Plus, more practically, I am not 100% sure if others can also publish the app by becoming collaborators or something, or if I alone can do it. In which case I will become a bottleneck and have sole power to publish things and it is not ideal as I will be under pressure to respond promptly. Ideally a group of developers should have permissions to publish it.

May be we need to setup an "organization" or something for the play store so anyone in that org will have access, similar to what my company does. But I do not know how to do that.

[Dakkaron]

I do have a developer account myself, have also published a few apps.

It is a one-time €25 fee over here, but same difference.

For the same reasons as @abhijitvalluri I would not want to publish this on my account. If we do go for Google Play we should probably pool money and create a special account for that.

Would it maybe be better to get it on F-Droid as an intermediate goal? It's free over there.

[abhijitvalluri]

Hey! Good news. As I suspected you can provide other users access to your Google Play Console account to publish releases. So this means that other developers can definitely also manage releases.

We could do one of two things, if we want to go this route:

1. I or someone else with a Google Play developer account can grant access to other users to publish as well via their account
2. If we do not want to share our personal account, we could create a new account and chip in the $25 fee and we can use this new one to publish the app and other devs can definitely be added to the account so anyone can manage the app and create a release.

I feel that compared to F-droid, Google Play Store will be a potentially quicker way to release the app due to it not requiring us to get rid of all the Mozilla code/removing non-free code etc. Hence, it may be the faster way to release this to the public.