Fractional Funding: A Proposal for Fair, Continuous, and Anonymous Funding for Accrescent and Its Apps

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Thought I’d linkpost here, as the recent future of Accrescent blog post got me inspired to open an issue on the tracker proposing an idea I’ve had for quite a while. Hoping this forum would be a good place to have a more informal discussion than the GitHub issue tracker : )

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Elementary did a similar thing years ago: About AppCenter Payments ⋅ elementary Blog

Do they have any stats about how effective it is/was?

also I edited your title, it was a bit redundant

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Ah, thanks for the title edit : D

I think the elementary’s AppCenter Payments is significantly different as its a thing that lets you go back and do a one-time payment for an app, as opposed to this which is something that continuously supports apps proportional to both their need and userbase size from a periodic payment. (i.e. a subscription). The benefit of a subscription model here is the same reason why companies like them so much, less cognitive load on the user to make decisions, since the payment just happens automatically. Although in this case instead of a company receiving the money, it gets distributed automatically and anonymously from the end-user’s device—and they can pay however much they choose and configure the algorithm to support whomever they want.

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yes, but you instead pay upon receiving updates instead of paying for an unknown

They like them because the “benefit” here is users forgetting about them and continuously feeding them money, borderline predatory.

This is not a good thing, you’re advocating people just let companies control them.

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Subscriptions aren’t necessarily predatory. They better line up with how software development has worked for a decade at this point. Before it made sense to make a one time purchase of software because it was in a box you paid for at an Office Depot. If you wanted an update, you had to buy the next box. Over time it changed to what we have today where updates can delivered seamlessly, but a one time purchase does not cover the ongoing cost of software support. If supporting software takes ongoing work and ongoing cost, then it makes sense to move to a model that asks for ongoing payment. That’s more sustainable.

Now do companies abuse this business model? Yes. However, that’s not intrinsic to the business model.

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I’m not advocating for a regular subscription service to pay for apps. I’m advocating for a system where users can choose to pay some amount they can periodically or whenever they want to support the apps they use and like in a fair, and anonymous manner. Where the cognitive load of donating to support apps is removed and automatically managed locally on-device.

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The difficulty I see with automatic crypto donations is that privacycoins like Monero are too anonymous (they can be used for criminal activity) while normal cryptocurrencies are too public which would leak loads of metadata about individuals in the public blockchain.

However, I did have similar ideas myself, see for example:

Getting back to your idea of automated periodic crypto donations, I do see a possibility to protect privacy without relying on a technology that also enables criminal activities. However, it seems as if such a cryptocurrency has yet to be created:

The idea would be that only one party of the transaction can remain anonymous. This ensures that only shops or content creators or projects that are abiding by the laws are able to receive money from or send money to anonymous wallets. It would be their responsibility to ensure that everything they offer or pay people for is legal while the people exchanging money for approved purposes could still remain anonymous.

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That is how GNU Taler works but I don’t believe any cryptocurrencies have adopted the technology.

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I think, it is also on the app developers (especially the ones making profit), to consider funding app stores like F-Droid and Accrescent, in proportion to the number of customers the app store brought them.

I brought this up with a couple FOSS developers I know that make (overall) £180k+/yr from in-app sales, but donate nothing. They still don’t (:

In a similar vein, if GrapheneOS can (since they’ve been vocal about F-Droid’s shortcomings and the need for an alternative store), they should carve up guaranteed monthly payments for a year or so, to keep the project going.

As for Accrescent, it is really a project that hasn’t yet fully taken off (unlike Aurora store, Obtanium, and F-Droid) and so, their funding issues are understandable, even if expected and unfortunate.

I’m meeting a few folks from FLOSS/fund,[1] I’ll also bring Accrescent up,[2] and recommend them for the next tranche (May/Oct 2026).

  1. FLOSS/fund recently grant Rethink $25k which will help us pay off a significant part of our credit card debt accrued over last 3 years running Rethink’s public DNS resolvers. ↩︎

  2. Accrescent seemed to have applied to FLOSS/fund last year, around the same time we did. ↩︎

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