Hi there. Just to make that clear upfront, I’m an Accrescent community moderator, but not a developer (Accrescent or otherwise) or project member beyond moderation (which I do for multiple communities/projects). I just wanted to make that clear so that any potential bias can be noted.
I’m personally very hopeful about Accrescent’s future. I currently use it to obtain apps that I use that are on there (admittedly, that’s only a few since Accrescent currently doesn’t allow public submissions, but is rather on a whitelist basis).
That said, to be consisent with Privacy Guides’ policy on these things, I would hold off from listing it as a store itself on the Android page for now. After all, it is in alpha and Privacy Guides doesn’t tend to recommend alpha software in the vast majority of cases.
What @dngray said above is correct in that downloading, installing and keeping apps updated has pretty much worked flawlessly for me, but it’s still missing a lot of things that people will expect from an app stores, especially when it comes to (obviously) selection of apps as well as app details (screenshots, descriptions, changelogs, links etc.)
The project’s public roadmap can be found here:
For the project to be considered to be in beta, at least all of the items in the beta column need to be finished.
Currently, the focus is on re-writing the developer console for app submissions/reviews in Kotlin, as well as making it easier for developers to automatically update their apps instead of having to use the developer console every update, but UI and user-facing features are definitely coming, as noted in the roadmap above.
For those reasons, and because I think people tend to try a thing once and form an opinion on it based on that instead of checking up on progress, I wouldn’t list it just yet.
It’s one thing for someone to see Accrescent recommended alongside Aurora Store, for example, where the insinuation is for it to be someone’s source of obtaining apps, and another thing for someone who is looking at other apps/projects to see Accrescent as a download option. That way, they’d be going into Accrescent to obtain said app, not to download it in hopes of finding apps they can use there, if that makes sense.
Therefore, my proposed solution for the time being if Accrescent is to be considered is for it to be added as a download option where it applies (as is currently the case for ExifEraser and Molly and if a recent PR is accepted, IVPN) but not added as a generic source to obtain apps until it’s at least in beta, and app submissions are public, which I expect to result in a radical increase in options in the store.
I would much rather see Obtainium listed in the Android page for the time being, which can be used as a generic option to obtain apps from a variety of sources and manage them with relative ease, rather than Accrescent where it’s currently just a house to a few select apps whose developers have been whitelisted.
Happy to hear others’ thoughts.
