The editorial argues that AnkiDroid — a 10M+ install project on Play since 2010 with fully public books on Open Collective — is exactly the kind of transparent operation the anti-fraud policy shouldn't be targeting. Every expense and payout is a permalink, making the 'consumer protection' rationale hollow in this specific case.
Surfaced the AnkiDroid GitHub issue on HN, where it pulled 700+ points in 12 hours. The framing — 'Google Play no longer allowing Open Collective donation link' — presents the policy enforcement as an overreach against a well-established open-source project.
Argues the underlying issue is a category error: Google's donation rules assume 'nonprofit fundraising campaign' as the mental model, but modern OSS funding runs through fiscal hosts like Open Collective that support individual maintainers and small teams. The policy structure doesn't accommodate this newer funding pattern, so legitimate projects get swept up in rules designed for a different problem.
Notes the same takedown email has hit Signal forks, KDE Connect maintainers, and F-Droid regulars over the past year, suggesting AnkiDroid is not an isolated incident but a systemic problem. The 'remove the link or lose the listing' choreography puts OSS projects in a lose-lose position where their primary distribution channel is used as leverage against their funding model.
Concedes that donations solicited outside vetted charity flows genuinely can be fraud vectors, so the policy isn't wrong on its face. The critique is about application — a blanket rule that can't distinguish a scam donation prompt from an audit-trail-transparent fiscal host like Open Collective ends up punishing the projects most deserving of trust.
On August 30, the AnkiDroid team filed [issue #21656](https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/21656) documenting a policy strike from Google Play. The offending element wasn't a tracker, a permission, or a dark pattern — it was a link. AnkiDroid's in-app 'Support the project' screen points to its Open Collective page, where contributors have funded server costs, translation bounties, and part-time development for years. Google's reviewer classified that link as a violation of the [Payments policy](https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9858738), which restricts donations to 'registered charitable organizations' processed through Google's own donation flow.
AnkiDroid is not a fly-by-night side project: it has been on Play since 2010, sits at over ten million installs, and is the reference open-source client for the Anki spaced-repetition ecosystem used by medical students, language learners, and researchers. The maintainers now face a familiar Play choreography — remove the link within a grace window or watch the listing get pulled. The HN thread pulled 700+ points inside twelve hours, largely because the same email has landed in the inboxes of Signal forks, KDE Connect maintainers, and half a dozen F-Droid regulars over the past year.
Google's stated rationale is consumer protection: donations solicited outside a vetted charity flow can be fraud vectors. The rationale is not wrong in the abstract. It is, however, being applied to a project whose books are literally public on Open Collective — every expense, every reimbursement, every contributor payout is a permalink.
The interesting thing here isn't the takedown notice. It's what the policy actually optimizes for. Google Play's donation rules were written assuming donations mean 'nonprofit fundraising campaign,' not 'tip jar for the person maintaining the software you use every day.' Under that framing, a fiscal host — Open Collective, Software Freedom Conservancy, NumFOCUS — is invisible. The fiscal-host model is how modern FOSS actually gets funded: a small project can't afford to incorporate a 501(c)(3), so it lives under a parent that handles the legal shell. Play's policy treats that structure as if it doesn't exist.
That mismatch has been quietly compounding. In the last eighteen months, similar reports have surfaced from the [Bitwarden community forks](https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden), several ad-blocker maintainers, and multiple RSS readers. The pattern is consistent: the project isn't monetizing, isn't running ads, isn't harvesting data — and gets flagged for the one line of text that keeps it alive. Meanwhile, apps stuffed with SDK trackers and ambiguous subscription funnels sail through review because they route money through Google Play Billing and hand over the 15%.
This is the second-order effect worth naming out loud. Play's economics reward apps that can pay the 15% tax and punish apps whose funding model exists precisely because they can't. Commercial apps have a revenue engine that survives the cut. A donation-funded FOSS project loses the entire donation if Play Billing is the only allowed rail — because 'donation' in Play Billing means a one-shot in-app purchase, which is neither tax-deductible for the donor nor recurring for the project. Open Collective solves both problems. Play's policy makes it uninstallable.
The community reaction on HN and Mastodon has been unusually pointed. F-Droid contributor [Hans-Christoph Steiner noted](https://social.librem.one/@eighthave) that this is exactly the failure mode F-Droid was built to route around, and that AnkiDroid has an F-Droid build already. That's true, and it's also a partial answer at best: F-Droid's install base is a rounding error next to Play's, and telling a medical student to sideload their flashcard app is not a serious distribution strategy in 2026.
If you maintain an Android FOSS project, three things are worth doing this week. First, audit any in-app link, help screen, or About page for the word 'donate,' 'support,' or 'sponsor' paired with an external URL. Play's automated reviewer is pattern-matching on these strings; the safest move short-term is to move funding CTAs to your website and link the website. It's ugly, it hurts conversion, and it's the current cost of shelf space.
Second, diversify off Play as the sole funding surface. [GitHub Sponsors](https://github.com/sponsors) has no equivalent restriction because it isn't reviewed by Play. Patreon, Ko-fi, and Liberapay pages linked from your GitHub README are untouched by this policy. The goal isn't to abandon Play users — it's to make sure a single policy-review email doesn't zero out your funding.
Third, and this is the harder one: if you're a maintainer with any leverage — a widely-used library, a well-known app, a corporate sponsor — push back publicly and specifically. The only reason Play's policies get carved out is escalation. When Signal hit similar friction on payments, it took months of public pressure. When Firefox needed the desktop-engine exception on iOS, it took EU regulation. Quiet compliance is what got us here.
The EU's Digital Markets Act designates Google Play a gatekeeper and requires it to allow alternative payment rails for developers who want them. That regime is being tested case by case, mostly by large publishers arguing about the 15%. The FOSS-donation case is the more sympathetic one — it's not a rent-seeking dispute, it's a policy that de facto defunds the volunteer software people use for medicine, education, and accessibility. Expect AnkiDroid's issue thread to become an exhibit in the next round of DMA complaints. Expect Play to update the policy language before that happens, quietly, in a way that treats fiscal hosts as first-class. And in the meantime, expect a few more mainstays to disappear from the store while everyone waits.
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