The last thing anyone who uses Lemmy would want is his data leaking to google.
I’m using it to gather crash information only. I am not using it for any other purpose.
The history here is I’ve been using Crashlytics for personal projects since forever. Crashlytics used to be part of Fabric which was bought by Twitter. It was then sold to Google. I’ve never felt a reason to change it so I just use it by default for all of my apps.
Crashlytics: https://firebase.google.com/docs/crashlytics
I’m seeing a lot of comments here accusing me/the app of doing something nefarious so I want to address this separately.
I want to be completely honest here.
I’ve been working on this app since June 13, 2023. It’s September 22nd now. That’s 4 months now. In that time I’ve been working practically everyday on the app just because I liked Lemmy, I wanted to get more content on here and I thought it would help Lemmy grow. I also worked on the app because I found it enjoyable so that was just a bonus.
My intentions with the app was to make something I and others would enjoy using as my primary browser for Lemmy. I pretty much use my own app every day, usually for at least an hour a day. I love my own app. It’s my baby.
So given all of this, it is just a little hurtful to see people accuse me of doing shady stuff with the app like stealing data. That is not my intention and will never be my intention.
I want to be transparent with the users and this community. I’m trying to walk this fine line of being as transparent as possible while still keeping the source closed. Yeah, it’s not what some people here prefer but I do enjoy having a little privacy to myself. To be as transparent as possible I do try to answer any questions any one asks me about the app as honestly as possible.
Now all of that said, I understand where people are coming from. I understand you guys have concerns about an app you might want to use everyday and you’d want to know you’re not being screwed. I get it. Hopefully I’ve made it painfully clear by now that that is not my intentions.
As a closing thought. I’ve been on Lemmy pretty much everyday for the past 4 month now and I find some members of the FOSS community to be a bit tinfoil hatty. I find that some people always assume the worst about everything. The world is a scary place but I think it’s important to know that it’s not always bad even if it seems that way. Not every decision is made with the intent of screwing others.
Anyways, as always I’m happy to chat so if you have any other questions/feature requests please keep them coming.
Yeah I uninstalled this app after I discovered it was making multiple and repeated connections to Google. Luckily, they were blocked by DDG Privacy App but I don’t want that shit on my mobile.
Damnit. This had been my favorite app.
I guess the closed source makes more sense now though…
Edit: dev comment below about closed source, and another in this thread about being able to toggle firebase off in a future update, which sounds like a reasonable compromise to me.
That is not the reason. I’ve answered this question multiple times before so I’ll just link my detailed response about this here: https://lemmy.world/comment/1606697.
but maybe thats how the developer is making money?