F-Droid Alphas and good news for CJK users

Posted on by Michael G

Author: Licaon_Kter
Source

TWIF generated on Thursday, 16 Nov 2023, Week 46

F-Droid core

F-Droid Basic and F-Droid were updated to 1.19.0-alpha1 as development continues. Note that this is still in beta so brave users need to install this manually (enable Beta updates for the app or from Client expert settings).

Community News

@Licaon_Kter highlights that Orgzly Revived was newly added, and as its name spells it out, it’s a fork of Orgzly that appeared out of necessity given that Orgzly’s main developer has not been seen for the last year. We hope @Neven if fine and safe!

As announced last week Arcticons Dark, Arcticons Light and Arcticons You were updated to 8.0.6 so you can now enjoy more than 8000 icons. And if your favourite app is not yet in, do ask for it!

@Vasyl Gello shared with us that RustDesk was updated to 1.2.3-1 bringing significant changes like:

  • Hardware keyboard support for Android: now you can use your favourite mechanics paired to your phone to control other desktops, servers or even phones!
  • Updated libraries: fixes CVE-2023-5217 and several other security vulnerabilities exploited in the wild.
  • Builds for all 4 platforms: arm, arm64, x86 and x86_64. Rustdesk becomes F-Droid’s first submission built with Flutter framework on 32-bit x86 Android.
  • Automated update support: new versions will be built automatically as soon as new upstream version becomes public!

Small note from @Licaon_Kter: RustDesk currently is flagged with the Tracking antifeature, but Vasyl promised they’re on track to fix that so F-Droid users get the chance to use their remote devices in a privacy-friendly way!

@rocka let us know that Fcitx5 for Android (and its plugins) have been updated to 0.0.8. Fcitx5 is a generic input method framework on Linux, the Android port includes virtual keyboard with customizable color scheme, clipboard management, as well as plugin support for adding more languages. English and Chinese (Pinyin, Wubi, Cangjie) are bundled within the application. Two plugins got updated this release:

  • Anthy: Japanese input method based on anthy-unicode
  • Clipboard Filter: strip tracking parameters from URLs in clipboard

And 6 more are now available:

  • Chewing: Zhuyin/Bopobomfo for Traditional Chinese based on libchewing
  • Hangul: Korean input method based on libhangul
  • Jyutping: Cantonese input method based on libime-jyutping
  • RIME: Rime Input Method Engine with custom schemas
  • Sayura: Sinhala input method
  • Unikey: Vietnamese input method

@linsui comments: Fcitx5 Android 0.0.8 is an exciting update for CJK users! The input methods apps are very important – without them you can’t input anything. English users maybe didn’t notice this since they can use the keyboard shipped with AOSP and there are many other keyboards like AnySoftKeyboard in F-Droid which support many more languages. However, CJK users have had much less choices, specially in F-Droid. We only had two general IME apps for Chinese users: Trime and Lime. There are few other apps supporting specific schemes. For Japanese users, there were only two choices: OpenWnn and Mozc Android, both of which are not maintained anymore, unfortunately. And we had no IME app for Korean users nor Sinhala users. Then what app were they using? Maybe GBoard was their only choice. But now the situation has changed! Fcitx5 Android brings many input methods to F-Droid and, since 0.0.8, most plugins available on Linux desktop are also available on Android. Besides that, as a input method framework, it’s much easier to develop a new input method for Android with it. So, if you’re stuck with GBoard, please give Fcitx5 a try!

Removed Apps

5 apps were removed

Como was no longer able to download words from its server.

Curator, LifeHQ and Wrotto are no longer developed, so their developer asked the team for them to be archived.

YARR’s repo was archived by its developer and it is no longer actively maintained.

Small note from @Licaon_Kter: Some of the apps were archived because users reported them to the F-Droid team, so if you see an app that suddenly misbehaves, fails to run, to connect to its services or otherwise malfunction, feel free to open an issue so the team can investigate and take measures as needed.

Newly Added Apps

6 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

149 more apps were updated

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