Yeah I know that’s allowed under the GPL, but you mentioned them “choosing to keep a FOSS version”, which if they didn’t do that would mean relicensing. It’s still FOSS here.

Obviously these phones aren’t as good as megacorp-backed Androids yet, they’re much newer and the software is being developed by the community for fucks sake. And the manufacturers haven’t had so many design revisions to recognise and fix all the issues.

They’re development/early adopter devices. And the killswitches aren’t pointless, because while you can enable airplane mode, that’s a software mechanism which can be maliciously changed, either by the manufacturer or an attacker. A kill switch will 100% cut you off.

Aren’t there outside contributors? How can they relicense it without their permission?

Download the .deb and double click it. https://mullvad.net/en/download/app/deb/latest

People seem to be making this a more difficult job than it needs to be. Yeah I get we’re powerusers but can’t we drop that for 2 minutes while giving advice so a new user can actually get a job done quickly? Windows EXEs don’t automatically update either. Sure it might not be the best way to do it but it’s fast and not confusing. (EDIT: Apparently this specific program actually has it’s own auto updater)

Things take time to learn. Throwing all of the existing knowledge of repo management at a new user at once does not work.