Additional repos shaping the UI

Posted on by Michael G

Author: paulali
Source

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 20 Jun 2024, Week 25

F-Droid core

One feature of F-Droid Client since 2018 is the support of loading additional repositories from the custom partition, this is used by custom ROMs Android distributions to include their own repositories and provide updates for their own apps or more. Examples of such are CalyxOS and DivestOS.

Since the latest 1.20 update redesigned not only the way repos are shown but how priorities work, one issue that was raised was that additional repos are added at the bottom of the list with a lower priority. In the past, while these were at the top, with a lower priority (in that old design), F-Droid had no concept of favorite repo for an app, hence updates were installed from whichever one had a newer version with a correct signature. This means that now, additional repos not only end up at the bottom of the list but also F-Droid will ignore updates they host if they are not marked as favorites for an app. In last week’s TWIF we’ve encouraged users to at least take a look in Settings – Manage Repos, more so if you have repos from your Android distribution there, you can move them to the top as a quick fix.

There is an issue discussing this here and a proposed work-in-progress fix here. If you are integrating additional repos in your own custom Android, feel free to read and provide your feedback.

Talking about updates, and auto-updates more exactly, users of Android 14 should be all setup for that perfect flow of unattended F-Droid bliss. Yet, we’ve heard from Fedi users that latest Android 14 June 2024 Quarterly Platform Release might break this on certain distributions. Here’s the CalyxOS issue and the GrapheneOS report, so if you see the same do share your experience.

Community News

CineLog, Rate and review movies and series that you saw, was removed back in April as its dependencies were not fully FOSS. But this week version 2.0.0 is back!

Delta Chat was updated to 1.46.5. The developers recently blogged about “Hardening Guaranteed End-to-End encryption based on a security analysis from ETH researchers and the security improvements that got into version 1.44 and about the improved “Instant Onboarding and Instant Message Delivery”.

Fennec F-Droid and Mull were updated to 127.0.0 with a bit of a delay. Mozilla, the developers of Firefox, the base for both apps, have recently gone through some repo and code changes that took more time and more polish than usual. We hope future versions land faster now that fixes were applied. We want to thank @relan and @IratePorcupine, the F-Droid contributors that take care of this huge endeavor.

Newly Added Apps

5 apps were newly added
  • AlexCalc – Scientific calculator with LaTeX equation display
  • CaptureSposed – Add support for blocking the Screenshot Detection API introduced in Android 14!
  • Notification Listener – Get notified only of important notifications
  • Raven – Use APIs and web scraping to fetch news articles
  • The One App – Manage a player’s characters in the RPG The One Ring

Updated Apps

133 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Read more

Related Posts: