Bible and Quran Apps Flagged Nsfw by F-Droid
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F-Droid flagged Bible and Quran apps as NSFW, sparking debate about content moderation, free speech, and cultural sensitivity.
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These people can perfectly well distribute their apps without F-Droid's help, they're not refusing to sign their app or somesuch.
Consistency would be that they in fact are removing everything that's NSFW.
And again, nothing was removed from the store here, only marked as NSFW.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/27861#...
The NSFW tag seems unevenly enforced, especially for an organization that is supposed to oppose censorship.
Who is "they" here? The person who opened the PR? The person who wrote the NSFW definition? The moderators correcting the mistakes?
> The answer is not submitting a PR to enable even more censorship.
It's not censorship, you can still install the apps to your phone. You just cannot promote them to impressionable audiences like children, or pretend it is appropriate conduct for something like the workplace. Your same logic could be used to argue that porn apps shouldn't be labelled as NSFW, or that gore and shock content is free expression.
F-Droid is not (and will never be) compelled to host the tools of evangelism. You don't need F-Droid's help to reach your audience. I'm a proud F-Droid user and defend their stance wholeheartedly.
"You just cannot promote them to impressionable audiences like children" - the fact that child has device is problem not the fact that device can access information.
"or that gore and shock content is free expression." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
...all of them? (AFAICT)
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.quantumbadger.redreader/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.btmura.android.reddit/
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/au.com.wallaceit.reddinator/
Actually, let's do it the other way: Can you point to a single reddit app that is marked NSFW?
A Bible reader/tracker app, a Quran learning app... now that's where you enter a more sensitive area, religious beliefs are among the higher protected classes of data under GDPR.
And now there's a few potential threat sources: family members snooping through their relative's phones, border control snooping through phones (remember, apostasy is a crime punishable by death in some Muslim countries), or the worst one, random ad SDKs pulling in and distributing lists of installed APKs and pushing these to the mothership, where the data can then be hoovered up by anyone willing to pay for it, with the same result [1].
I wish I didn't need to write this, but it's not just some random Middle East theocracy going for its citizens as usual for the crime of not believing into the god of choice, we're seeing people being threatened for their faith (or lack of it) right in the United States of America, right now.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/05/22/intel-agencies-buying-da...
Evangelism is a danger to kids, and unfit for the workplace too. We should not encourage young Americans to indoctrinate themselves with nonsense propaganda that encourages killing.
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.
As pointed out in the PR... there's violent games with NSFW descriptions that were not flagged.
The fact they're ignoring so much is what makes me think this has nothing to do with NSFW content removal.
"NSFW" is just the name of the F-Droid Anti-Feature, which is quite broad than what "not safe for work" implies:
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.
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...
Not having categories like "NSFW" would be a nice level playing field.
I’m just advocating that violent texts like this should also be included rather than treated specially.
Guess I have to find another app store. To use and to donate to. Stupid wars over what's NSFW are ignorable, but knuckling under to the AV gestapo isn't.
They would definitely have to blacklist the UK as well. And other places if I remember right.
The abrahamic religious texts intersect largely around the Old Testament, which is a smorgasbord of genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse of all flavours, and all the rest.
I guess the question is whether religious texts should be exempt from content warnings, in which case one should expect films like “The Passion of the Christ” to be available for general audiences, not R.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
They are still our opinions. We share the planet with people who think, equally inflexibly, that the bible does not advocate for slavery and genocide. And the way we do that without resorting to terrible violence (including slavery and genocide!) is by agreeing to disagree by not censoring each other.
This isn’t my opinion of what the bible contains - any more than I could argue that Hellraiser is a cute movie about bunny rabbits.
Not all facts are subjective.
But as a practical matter, I'll point out that trying to ban the interpretation held by the three billion or whatever practicing christians on the planet is a better way to end up as a sacrifice on that altar than to improve the world.
Look, this whole idea is dumb. No, F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of denying religion to make a bunch of intemperate nerds like us happy. Are we really having this fight?
Now, anyway, you need to stop talking smack about my mother, and I disliked the death threat you made just there, and I don’t need to know about what you do with fish in the bedroom.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?
This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.
>> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
Like wikipedia?
This definitely ties into a weakness in the U.S. speech laws — we rarely view obscenity as relevant to non-erotic topics, so our social edifices are ill-equipped at considering this topic at all: by social assumption, a non-erotic text such as the old testament bible is unconsciously assumed exempt from obscenity concerns even though it is blatantly NSFW. (I can’t speak to how other countries handle this topic.)
Perhaps this is the only “think of the children” content warning they have, and therefore it seems odd when applied to religious texts. It’s like a movie rating system where there are only G and X ratings. If it’s not G, it gets lumped in with other stuff, including X-rated porn, and the only way to find it in our App Store is to allow for X-rated content.
Seems like a bug at best, but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to think this is an “aww shucks, rules are rules” application of some policy.
You've hit on a good point, but I don't know what to do about it.
Although you can construct peaceful narratives from both books, and most people are trying to do that, and I commend and appreciate their efforts immensely, fact of the matter is: you are swimming up the current.
The societies depicted in them were highly disturbed, warring tribes. The lessons from stories were harsh, often bordering on sadism. Pretty much everyone grew up with trauma if they survived.
Although you can find little nuggets of wisdom here and there about being humble and patient and not getting on a high horse, calling these books key to the universe is like pushing a camel through a needle hole.
Now should people mark "holy" book apps unsafe? maybe, but it isn't going to save children from being exposed. It will just disturb well meaning people and enrage the not so nice ones.
> is like pushing a camel through a needle hole
I see what you did there...
Well, after personally destroying some cities, cursing an entire civilization with plagues including the death of their firstborn, and ordering the "chosen people" to take over some land by slaughtering everybody living there. And the "getting killed" part didn't remove the threat of eternal fire for anybody who doesn't go along with the program. That's the big stuff I remember off the top of my head.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
Btw., the purificatorium is actually a bath (in Latin) and it's not eternal. Also Jesus isn't talking much about that.
> You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
Yes. But it's still introduction and references for the punchline.
That's supposed to be a quote from Jesus, personally. In fact he's talking about himself saying that in the future. See that word "everlasting"? Other translations use "eternal".
It's permanent Hell. It's really, really clear. He doesn't have to talk much about it, because he's made the point.
[Edited to fix the chapter and verse]
In my opinion this doesn't describe anything happening in this world, so it is not relevant, whether to label it NSFW, and it isn't encouraging you to be violent in this world.
if people find the UI so bad, wouldnt it be easier to try to push an updated UI than getting all the infrastructure and everything going?
>> When reviewing apps to accept, F-Droid takes the user’s point of view, first and foremost. We start with strict acceptance criteria based on the principles of free software and user control. There are some things about an app that might not block it from inclusion, but many users might not want to accept them. For these kinds of things, F-Droid has a defined set of Anti-Features. Apps can then be marked with these Anti-Features so users can clearly choose whether the app is still acceptable.
>> Anti-Features are organized into “flags” that packagers can use to mark apps, warning of possibly undesirable behaviour from the user’s perspective, often serving the interest of the developer or a third party. Free software packages do not exist in a bubble. For one piece of software to be useful, it usually has to integrate with some other software. Therefore, users that want free software also want to know if an app depends on or promotes any proprietary software. Sometimes, there are concepts in Anti-Features that overlap with tactics used by third parties against users. F-Droid always marks Anti-Features from the user’s point of view. For example, NSFW might be construed as similar to a censor’s blocklists, but in our case, the focus is on the user’s context and keeping the user in control.
Emphasis mine.
Was not aware of this and it does put the flagging in a different light.
The argument can be made than an app which displays religious imagery is not suitable for the workplace, but if it's just a reader with texts, then not.
If someone wants to spy over your shoulder to read text on your screen, and it doesn't jibe with their religion, that is their problem.
And, if that's where the goalposts lie, then atheistic texts could be offensive in such a way. I.e. a Mastodon post claiming "there is no god" should be marked NSFW and blurred out until you click something.
Here I think the labelling doesn’t really make sense but it never does anyway and pretty much means "this content is part of a corpus American think is objectionable and wouldn’t want to be seen with in public”.
I enjoy the controversy for putting in light the usual imperial blindness however.
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.
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.
People are comfortable with religious texts because they are bought up with them and know which pieces to ignore, just look at the moral panic around teenagers getting hold of a Qaran and going off to join ISIS after 9/11. Hell I find the prevalence and acceptance of genital mutilation encouraged by religious texts horrendous when I spend time considering it.
It's not a hardship to let parents decide whether kids should have access to this stuff. That being said what the tag does in context of the f-droid shop is not really helpful behavior. It's not what most people would expect for parental control and outside of countries where the texts may be proscribed it's not really helpful behavior to hide these apps.
Now, to be fair, the voice did walk that back once it was clear the guy was going to do it. It just needed to be reassured that it was special.
I'm not sure that this label works though - I get the F-Droid is doing it because of regulatory push but it seems to me that simply notion of "safe internet" or "safe app-store" is fundamentally misguided (we didn't made TV safe - just gave ranking and let parents decide)- and I can see that someone with modern sensibilities looking at older or god-forbid "ancient" literature will have to mark huge swaths of it as not safe.
I think that most of this rage should instead be directed toward this regulatory nonsense instead of F-droid though.
This does illustrate ironical thing - and what christian puritans forget - bible will not OK for atheistic/modern puritans.
Which is super weird definition of hardcore porn. No, a vanilla sex appearing in a book does not make it hard porn book.
> people following the voice in their head to kill their son, which is from the bible
A thing that appears in book and stories for kids. Including the ones the kids are taught about in school. And yes I have kids in school.
>A thing that appears in book and stories for kids
Sure but does it appear as a moral good thing to do? If it does is it because the voice in the head is telling them to kill evil doers rather than innocents? You can see why you'd want to have a discussion with your kids about it just like you'd hopefully have a discussion about what they may see in porn not being real/healthy for most relationships. This is obviously at age appropriate times, there's a good reason kids aren't being told about Sodom and Gomorrah in all it's detail in kindergarten, why cartoons of the story of the Ark don't focus on the babies drowning as mothers struggle to swim holding them above their heads before succumbing to exhaustion or the cold... only to continue to exist forever in eternal torment.
As far as I know, the definition of "hardcore porn" is and always has been explicit depiction of actual sexual activity (on edit: in a way intended to be sexually arousing to the reader/viewer). In pictures, that generally comes out to genitalia being shown in contact with genitalia or other body parts.
And that's how you do vanilla sex.
What is your super weird definition?
> No, a vanilla sex appearing in a book does not make it hard porn book.
"... and then they had sex" wouldn't. A relatively clinical or relatively expurgated sentence or two wouldn't.
> A thing that appears in book and stories for kids.
What particular book or story do you have in mind here, and exactly what does it say, and how does it present it? Because the Bible presents it as praiseworthy to be prepared to kill your son if you hear God tell you to do it, and gives what it claims is an actual, factual, historical example.
I'm sorry, but I find books that say straight out that I should be killed to be a bit on the offensive side. I'm funny that way.
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?
Posting Google searches as references is pretty lame.
The New Testament clearly condones slavery, but I think all the stuff telling you to take slaves is in the old.
> new testament scripture about killing women and children: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
When I follow that link, every single thing on the page is from the Old Testament.
If I remember right, the worst you get in the New Testament is massive sexism, exhortations to obey authority in things you obviously shouldn't, and threats to throw people into Hell post-death. Oh, and a note from Jesus that the rather draconian laws of the Old Testament still apply, including the parts about stoning people to death for random silly offenses, although he doesn't list them and I think that's mostly been munchkined around.
... but both testaments are canonical and authoritative for most versions of Christianity... it doesn't make that much sense to carve up the book, and none of the apps actually exclude the Old Testament.
Which is fine, but it is just NSFW.
Fundamentalism ?
Why would it be surprising for them? I guess the never read the book they are preaching.
> The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter.
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere.
https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#nsfw
That is clearly not applicable to the vast majority of these apps' users as evidenced by their outrage.
Also, maybe don't assume I'm an atheist just because I pointed out some of the Bible's NSFW contents in a discussion about the Bible being NSFW.
I encountered actual prurient material on the shelves of the school library, and heard far worse obscenity in the locker room during gym class. The most erotic stuff in the Bible, Song of Songs, is quaint by the standards of a century ago, let alone today.
If F‐Droid is trying to drum up opposition to the UK’s extreme suppression of pornography, they've muddled it. They could have defied the unjust restrictions, or they could have leaned into it and marked Wikipedia apps, Reddit apps, Mastodon apps, and Project Gutenberg apps the same way.
That they did neither indicates that they have chosen to specifically target religious content, and not just by marking it. F-Droid developers openly state (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026) that (1) new NSFW apps will not be added, and (2) existing NSFW apps will be removed.
It's bad on principle: F-Droid is akin to a distribution package repo, and should not prohibit apps based solely on ideology (nor should Debian, Gentoo, BSD ports…); and it's also impractical: given the looming threat of government suppression of app stores, F‐Droid (already an underdog) should not be driving away supporters by taking up anti‐religious ideology.
If you tried to take your position to a court in the US, even now, you'd be treated as a frivolous litigant... which, to be clear, means being told to fuck off and not come back.
Please stop posting this kind of ignorance. It burns.
Nobody is throwing anybody in prison, nor threatening to.
One of the reasons the First Amendment applies only to the government is that, unlike an app store, it can throw people in prison.
But we're talking about F-Droid here. It has a tiny market share. It uses software that lets literally anybody else set up a repository and have it appear integrated in the same app. It doesn't benefit from any of the legal or social advantages given to large corporations. F-Droid, unlike Apple or Google, can't in fact do much to limit anybody's speech.
Just confused about the outrage.
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.
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.
Personally, I wouldn't want my kids exposed to this kind of material without at least having a chance to talk to them about it first. Would you want your child getting sucked into something like Scientology without your knowledge?
"Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending" - you think that way because you are biased to classify your religious text as not nsfw - but there is no such reason really - christianity is no longer main ideology of everyone.
Tagging a religious book or a reader of such as "NSFW" means, declaring it as "not normal".
Declaring something, which is a fundamental right, as not normal, is discrimination.
Edit: I am a bit one-sided here. Faith also is a social glue (look e.g. at the Muslims), and it actively works for spiritual self determinism. At least Buddhism, Toltecism and Scientology do.
Do they check every fact that they learn by experimentation?
Or do they trust/believe authority that given them such fact mindlessly?
Can we stop putting our morality and faith above another's?
Any aggressive ideology that forces it believers to censor non-believer viewpoint is ultimately self-destructive - even if you force non-believers they will not believe in it - because they never trusted it.
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.
"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
Pathetic. Carte blanc on anything using the word Bible is a telltale sign. A 'I've read these verses' tracker also banned, having contained none of what they object to. Violent video game descriptions not banned. Do it right or don't do it. It's simple.
> 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.
- Religious books are not for kids
- They aren't primarily written to be violent
Instead it's more like a Mexican stand off, whoever first tries to be reasonable gets shot.
* "Want the Bible in public school classrooms? There's an app for that": https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/11/04/an-oklahoman... (www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/11/04/an-oklahoman-wants-ryan-walters-to-considering-a-free-bible-app-instead-of-spending-millions-on-athe/75570802007/); https://archive.ph/14iDg
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