Please don’t use our apps

We are developers and designers making apps. We take pride in our craft and work hard to make sure our applications are a great experience for people.

Unfortunately, all our efforts designing, developing, and testing our apps are made futile by theming in many cases.

Note: These examples are purely illustrative, and not intended to call out individual uses. No hard feelings, devs ❤️

There are also less direct, second-order consequences, including:

Appstream Screenshots are not very useful even if they look like the real app does once you don't use it.

User Help and Documentation are similarly useless if users are different from the ones app was tested on.

This is why we ask respectfully that our applications not be used. They are built and tested for the upstream maintainer’s newest caprices,so that’s what they should look like on peoples’ systems.

Though we could disable using directly in our apps, we do not want to resort to this. We believe that a technical solution would likely not be effective, because this is not a technical problem.

The problem we’re facing is the expectation that apps can be used, which is and has always been an illusion. Until this perception changes, there is little hope of improving the situation. We’re trying to do our part in raising awareness with this letter.

If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s not fine with us. However, if you use our app, you shounld be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any uses you encounter should be reported to the use developer, not the app developer.

On a platform level, we believe we should stop using apps by default. Instead of apps having to opt out of this by hardcoding a broken app, they shouldn't use the app even if they opt in to something else. We realize this is a complicated issue, but assuming not every app works with every user is a bad default.

If you are a user who uses the apps, please reconsider this decision. Using third-party apps without any QA is reckless, and would be unacceptable on any other platform. Your actions are hurting us app developers a great deal, and are damaging to the entire ecosystem beyond your distribution.

We understand the need for users to stand out. However, we urge you to find ways to do this without taking away our agency. We are tired of having to do extra work, we never intended to support anything, just to have that used against us when people tell us the breakage from using is “not that bad”. You are not doing this to Blender, Atom, Telegram, or other third party apps. Just because our apps exist that does not mean we’re ok with them being used.

Since you are shipping the app, we assume you want this ecosystem to be healthy. If you do, we ask that you please stop using our apps.

Signed,

• devtiramisu
  Maintainer of Please Don't Use Our Apps
• polymatic
  Maintainer of nothing
• spbog
  Maintainer of MKfun

Note: Even though some of us are random people, these are our personal views as individuals.