Make donation button more prominent in App details view

Right now, it is not as easy as it could be to donate in F-Droid. The donation option should be prominent, and visible on the main app details page (not in the menu, where it is less likely people will see it). Although I don't have a specific solution for where to put the button with the current design of the App details page, I can see how it would fit nicely with this design, proposed by the same designer who did the swap workflow (pdf, 1.7MiB). On page 4, in the "App Details" section, I feel the the UI is less cluttered by separating the description from other key details (including the install button). I can envision a "Donate" button next to the install button too.

Added ui label

This library might be useful, it would also add support for Paypal: https://github.com/sufficientlysecure/android-donations-lib

Showing three buttons, with spelled-out text labels, labeled "Update", "Uninstall", and "Donate", as is shown on page 4 of the PDF you linked to? I like this idea.

Until today, I don't think I even knew that the "Share / Ignore All Updates / ... / Donate" menu even existed.

@jasonspiro Currently I work on improving the app details, that's how it looks like yet:

The important thing is that I moved some stuff from the action bar to the main layout and made the description expandable, so the details screen won't look like that when I'm finished.

Dear @NicoAlt:

1. I did not fully understand the screenshot, since I only speak English, not German. But I like the improvements you have made to the "app details" screen. Thank you!

2. It would be even better if you would change the strings "Quelltext", "Probleme", "Internetseite", "Spenden", and "View more" from black to blue, and if you would make those words underlined. :)

Dear @eighthave:

Adding in android-donations-lib would be good.

Or you could just do things the lazy way:

Open up the user's web browser. Then point the user to the PayPal donation link for the relevant PayPal account, such as: https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_donations&business=jasonspiro%40gmail%2ecom&currency_code=USD

You can generate a PayPal donation link for any individual. Just change "jasonspiro%40gmail%2ecom" to the individual's actual email address.

PayPal will deduct their usual fees from the donation. (I think this is usually 2.9% plus $0.30 plus cross-border fees plus currency conversion fees.) If the recipient has a charitable-organization PayPal account, the fees will be lower.

mentioned in merge request !93 (closed)

mentioned in merge request !94 (merged)

Closing since !94 (merged) got merged.

Status changed to closed

Status changed to reopened

reopening since !94 (merged) seems to have removed the Donate button entirely. I'm looking at d6aa60b211bee199d4ab1c5f0ff9679d09d34270 and there is no donate button anywhere I can find.

Status changed to closed

Ah, ok, that is more consistent, but well hidden. Considering that bug report was titled "make more prominent", this seems to fail in that goal. I've been thinking that we should make users click through the donate stuff before installing. For apps that have a donation method setup, the Install button would say Donate first. Then the user will have click on that, and on the donate screen the user can choose to donate zero or check off the "never show again" checkbox.

The more we get people to pay for free software, the better free software we will have! :-D

I am not at all agreeing with you there. If I had to "ok" through "please donate" screens every time I installed an app, it would be both ridiculous and annoying. And I'd probably stop using F-Droid altogether.

that's where the "never show again" checkbox comes in

A few thoughts:

• I'm partial to the idea of a screen that shows up without opting in, as long as it has a prominent "Don't show this again" (think the "Use NFC" screen in the swap workflow, with a checkbox to never show again, and a "Skip" button that is clear)
• However given we don't have screenshots/reviews/etc, people don't know much about what they're getting into until they have installed the app and played with it. There are many apps that I've installed which, while I appreciate that somebody has put the time in to making it and also the generosity to open source it, is not something that I'd find useful myself. As such, I have little info to go on whether I would contribute to the development of it or not.

Having said that, I think that @eighthave is probably right that although what @NicoAlt has is an improvement on what was there before, this probably doesn't fit the bill of "Making donation links more prominent".

(sorry if I came across as grumpy before) I think @pserwylo brings up an important point, which is that some people will want to try apps before they donate. Many people will be willing to donate just to try an app, especially if the price is low (like less than $1 or 1Euro) since they are already used to that from other app stores. So I think @NicoAlt's direction here is good: it provides a standard way for people to donate whenever they think of it. We could also add the possibility of donation reminders, so the options for donate when downloading are: Now, Maybe Later, Never, Never For All Apps.

The key for FDroid is that the user should be free to do whatever they want, but we should make the default that people are paying for software. Otherwise, if we make everything gratis by default, FDroid will be dominated by hobbyist software and have fewer of the boring, difficult, important apps like calendars, email, messaging, maps, video playback, etc.

I think a great example here is http://WNYC.org, the big radio/media station in New York. Something like 90% of their budget comes from direct donations of the listeners. And there budget is massive. They are good at nagging their listeners to donate. They announce in advance that they are going to be asking for donations in a given week, then they spend half the time asking for donations (aka a "pledge drive"). But if people donate enough before that week, then they cancel the pledge drive.

Status changed to reopened

I appreciate that you are all trying to help upstream devs here, but I still think that we don't want to go down the nagging route. Reminds me too much of games that do stuff like "wait 10m or use 10 credits to skip the waiting".

Granted that you're saying that this should be opt-out, but I still think it would be annoying. Making the buttons appear right besides "install", however, would be something that would be a great idea IMHO. Like, a green Donate button besides (or on top of) the black/white Install button.

For now, I think putting a Donate button next to Install/Run works for me. It'll be easy to implement and be a good introduction. I'll volunteer to do it, unless someone else wants to take it on.

Sure. Although if we merge all donate options into a single Donate button, there needs to be a dialog with the different donate options available when the user clicks "Donate".

@eighthave wrote:

I've been thinking that we should make users click through the donate stuff before installing.

No. As pserwylo pointed out, that's too early.

Lately, I've been using F-Droid 0.91. It sadly only seems to let me upgrade apps manually, one at a time, even if upgrades to multiple apps are available at the same time.

This is not an ideal workflow. (The Google Play store does things much better. IIRC it does upgrades automatically, then notifies me once they are complete.)

But, as long as F-Droid retains its non-ideal workflow: You could show a pop-up donation request for an app only after an upgrade of that app, and only if it's ever been launched at least 100 times.

Bulk install, removal and upgrading of apps is a known issue and there is an issue for it already on the tracker, FWIW.

For handling multiple donation options from the single Donate button, I was thinking of doing a Share-style pop-up chooser. It would be based on detecting which apps respond to the various link types, e.g. bitcoin:, litecoin:, https://www.paypal.com, etc. For bitcoin and litecoin, I was thinking of only using the Android apps. For PayPal and Flattr, I was thinking that the browser would be the fallback option if there wasn't an app installed.

FWIW, we already have rudimentary support for links - we try and launch them, and if no app can handle them, instead of crashing F-Droid shows a toast. See tryOpenUri.

To leave my thoughts about this here:

When I started working on the improve-details branch, I didn´t know that it´s meant to be that prominent. I agreed that the links, including the donation button, were too hidden, so I made it more prominent, also if this doesn´t solve what the issue meant to be.

However, I like the idea of reminding the user that he can donate to the developer of an app. But I think, this has to be opt-in, at least at the beginning, and the reminder should be shown first when the app is installed like one to two week(s). IMHO it´s to early to show the reminder when the user installs the app because I would not donate to an app I haven´t tried at least once.

mentioned in issue #692 (closed)

Milestone changed to %0.103 - UX Overhaul

Added ~16415 label

mentioned in issue #749 (closed)

@crwinfrey in case you didn't see this, its a good discussion of the donation issues

mentioned in issue #827 (closed)

I'm going to close this as !426 (merged) was merged. Check out the screenshots there to see how prominent it now is.

closed