Hey there! Sentry is only used to detect errors automatically if they occur on your device. It is an opt-in feature, and you can disable it or enable it at any time. This information is useful for me to determine if there are any large scale issues that come up due to a recent release and allows me to quickly take actions which might otherwise take longer to detect.
I opted to include this as this is still a very early alpha release, and having this allows me to bring better and less error-prone releases to everyone! Eventually, as this app progresses from alpha to a more stable version, I will most likely remove it as it’ll be less useful for me overall
It asks whether you want to enable sentry at first start and you can enable/disable it anytime in the settings too. I’d also like a tracker-free version on F-Droid long term, but for now this is okay for me personally.
You can disable Sentry reporting. Don’t think it’s even enabled by default.
And it alerts you the first time you open the app…
Not the developer, but there’s an option in the settings to turn Sentry error tracking off. I don’t remember if it was enabled by default.
Pretty sure it asks you on initial launch.
It’s opt in, not opt out, so you can decide to allow it or not.
Calling Sentry spyware is a bit of stretch. It’s debugging telemetry.
“Telemetry” as I am sure you know, is a nice euphamism for unwanted user tracking code which f-droid appropriately labels as an anti-feature.
As a user of a FOSS app, having apps sending data and reports on my usage to third parties is not a desirable feature. With the massive data broker market out there, even innocuous debugging data can be deanonymized, aggregated, linked and sold.
Personally I believed this is another reason reddit wanted to get ride of 3rd party apps, Their official app contains tons of spyware and collects identifiable device IDs. Selling this data is a huge market which they can capitalize on.
Im not saying that any of this is happening currently with the way this app has implemented Sentry however this is sort of the point. As a user it is difficult to independently verify what data is being sent as it is likely encrypted. Even if you verify it isn’t happening in the current version, the presence of the code allows for the scope of data collection to be expanded in future versions which could happen as the app developed.
From the users point of view, not having the Sentry user tracking classes in the code at all is the most desirable outcome.
Reddit had several FOSS app including Slide which were completely free of tracking code. It looks like Liftoff and Jerboa are currently clean, it would be nice to try Thunder as well.
