This is a very problematic choice and as much as I want to think it wasn't malicious, at every turn it sure looks like it's meant to be inflammatory.
I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW (under F-Droid's bizarre and very not normal definition of that word): To protect persons living in areas of the world where association with that religion is ruinous or outright dangerous due to persecution.
Aside from that extreme outlier, this is very bad, to not only associate a censoring label to anybody's relgious text, but a label that accuses the text of being offensive in the name of not producing offense. Virtue-signaled sensitivity to users desires (as if that's a single, unified, knowable thing), "political incorrectness" and "religious... settings"? Yikes, so much irony. Anti-feature indeed.
This whole matter is far outside the bounds of a software repository's domain of responsibility, and it's inappropriate for them to try.
In the "most literal" interpretation no. It's generally safe to read the Bible at work, (during times when reading anything non-work related is allowed).
Abrahamic religious texts, and a lot of others as well, are offensive. They clearly and directly glorify oppressive and/or genocidal violence in the past. There's a very strong argument that they demand similar violence in the present and future. They definitely demand a whole bunch of evil and oppressive social institutions. They're more offensive than hardcore porn. Any "believers" who claim they don't really mean what they say should get exactly as much consideration as people who claim hardcore porn doesn't really mean the sex.
It's just that F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of caring what's "NSFW".
No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps and ignored things like reddit when doing this I would say its just an honest mistake, but they only seemingly marked Bible related apps. In one instance the developers app isn't even an app that contains the Bible, its a Bible reading tracker so you can keep track of which verses you have read thus far, still marked NSFW. There was not enough thought put into this ban and it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
> We don't flag general apps, e.g., ebook readers and browsers. But bible readers are not general apps. They are designed to read bible and there are NSFW contents in bible.
Honestly I think their argument is pretty weak, especially since like you said in this case it was a bible reading tracker.
> If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps. ［...］ it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
Not true. Quran just as targeted as Bible.
> and ignored things like reddit
What do you mean with "ignored reddit"? There is no official reddit app on f-droid and community clients are flagged with the "depends on or promotes non-free network service" anti-feature.
An offline reading-tracking app being flagged sounds like one false positive that should be corrected, though. Have you tried submitting a PR for it?
It seems someone at F-Droid may have a political axe to grind with the current US presidency and the majority of the population of America who elected (1.)them.
Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.
"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."
Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
But I get it at the same time - some people may want them on their devices.
I'm more concerned in this case that NSFW section contains "political incorrectness". Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases? A "committee" of experts on discord?
> Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
I get what you are trying to say, but so far, there are actual real high-effort apps. Sefaria is my greatest example of that, since it tries not to be just a book reading app, but to visually show a graph of how text is related between translations, midrash and more commentary. But yeah, most are surely low-effort, I can't disagree on that.
> Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases?
It's the same question as "Who watches the watchers?", I don't think a centralized architecture, like F-Droid or Android itself, can solve it.
In this case PWAs appear to be a good option for that kind of content, if only we could make their installation and use as seamless as using the playstore. They might be on par with F-Droid, however.
Yeah I'm just glad this NSFW tag filters out all this junk.... The screenshot in the thread of all the Bible apps in search after toggling filter is actually funny.
> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.
F-Droid are in the FA stage of FAFO. If they don't reverse this, they will find themselves in the FO stage. Anyone can hold the opinion that "religion or its texts are ruinous" but you can never apply it in practice in a liberal democracy (even in secular states) simply because religious and expression rights are legally protected.
Don't moral police people especially on something that is as controversial as this.
Or this could be the FO itself. Both the threshold for NSFW as well as anti-puritanism sentiment has crept up so high that it has reached "religion is a cancer" stage.
> religious and expression rights are legally protected.
What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).
In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.
The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."
If they insist on flagging things as NSFW then this would be the correct action for those apps that contain the texts. It seems like apps that are bible related and don't contain the text are being flagged though which should be fixed.
This is my issue with it as well, but also, why did the PR only target Bible apps? Seemingly in a very lazy way at that. Had they taken time to understand how each app works and its purpose, they would have only flagged apps that contain the Bible itself. I would hope reddit and other apps that actually contain graphic NSFW content are next?
The only merge request you've seen targets bible apps. How do you know this isn't one part of a larger effort to correctly mark apps? Maybe they've tackled other categories previously, or had intended to tackle other categories going forward. The fact that bible apps is included in one wave of markings doesn't mean only bible apps are affected.
I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.
I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?
Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
I mean, unless you work at an organisation that deals with a specific religion, I would say that they're all NSFW, as there's no reason to be using them at work, and they're bound to cause controvosy at some point.
Given the level of NSFW material in some of them (sex, violence, etc), I think it's not surprising they're getting labelled as such, even without the link to a religion.
Readit News
I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW (under F-Droid's bizarre and very not normal definition of that word): To protect persons living in areas of the world where association with that religion is ruinous or outright dangerous due to persecution.
Aside from that extreme outlier, this is very bad, to not only associate a censoring label to anybody's relgious text, but a label that accuses the text of being offensive in the name of not producing offense. Virtue-signaled sensitivity to users desires (as if that's a single, unified, knowable thing), "political incorrectness" and "religious... settings"? Yikes, so much irony. Anti-feature indeed.
This whole matter is far outside the bounds of a software repository's domain of responsibility, and it's inappropriate for them to try.
Which is fine, but it is just NSFW.
new testament scripture about killing women and children: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
What was "Passion of the Christ" rated, and why?
Abrahamic religious texts, and a lot of others as well, are offensive. They clearly and directly glorify oppressive and/or genocidal violence in the past. There's a very strong argument that they demand similar violence in the present and future. They definitely demand a whole bunch of evil and oppressive social institutions. They're more offensive than hardcore porn. Any "believers" who claim they don't really mean what they say should get exactly as much consideration as people who claim hardcore porn doesn't really mean the sex.
It's just that F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of caring what's "NSFW".
No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
Fundamentalism ?
Edit - found more context: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
I still don't get it to be honest.
> We don't flag general apps, e.g., ebook readers and browsers. But bible readers are not general apps. They are designed to read bible and there are NSFW contents in bible.
Honestly I think their argument is pretty weak, especially since like you said in this case it was a bible reading tracker.
Not true. Quran just as targeted as Bible.
> and ignored things like reddit
What do you mean with "ignored reddit"? There is no official reddit app on f-droid and community clients are flagged with the "depends on or promotes non-free network service" anti-feature.
An offline reading-tracking app being flagged sounds like one false positive that should be corrected, though. Have you tried submitting a PR for it?
"NSFW" is just the name of the F-Droid Anti-Feature, which is quite broad than what "not safe for work" implies:
It seems someone at F-Droid may have a political axe to grind with the current US presidency and the majority of the population of America who elected (1.)them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.
"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslid...
But I get it at the same time - some people may want them on their devices.
I'm more concerned in this case that NSFW section contains "political incorrectness". Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases? A "committee" of experts on discord?
I get what you are trying to say, but so far, there are actual real high-effort apps. Sefaria is my greatest example of that, since it tries not to be just a book reading app, but to visually show a graph of how text is related between translations, midrash and more commentary. But yeah, most are surely low-effort, I can't disagree on that.
It's the same question as "Who watches the watchers?", I don't think a centralized architecture, like F-Droid or Android itself, can solve it.
In this case PWAs appear to be a good option for that kind of content, if only we could make their installation and use as seamless as using the playstore. They might be on par with F-Droid, however.
> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.
Deleted Comment
Don't moral police people especially on something that is as controversial as this.
What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).
In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.
The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
Dead Comment
"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."
[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026
Not having categories like "NSFW" would be a nice level playing field.
I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?
Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
Given the level of NSFW material in some of them (sex, violence, etc), I think it's not surprising they're getting labelled as such, even without the link to a religion.