Category: News

Spring cleaning, file sharing and video editing

Posted on by Michael G

TWIF generated on Thursday, 25 Jan 2024, Week 4

Community News

Are you going to FOSDEM between 3 & 4 February 2024 in Brussels? If you do, be sure to update the FOSDEM Companion app to version 2.2.1. Maybe even search for the F-Droid Team members while you’re there. Cheers!

@linsui quickly edits a clip as:

Money Manager Ex, Manage your income and expenses on a mobile device, synchronize via cloud, is back after a long one and a half year hiatus, being a casualty of mid-2022’s “Spring Cleaning” (more on that below).

Newly merged Open Video Editor, video editor, built with Media3 and Jetpack Compose, sounds like the answer to a long standing question. While Video Transcoder and FFShare worked fine (when not crashing or rejecting vertical or H.265 videos) for a simple re-encode or cut, this new app is a bit more feature packed allowing you to: Trim, Grayscale, Resolution, Scale, Rotate already.

We just published the last version of Tachiyomi. See details about why the development stoped on the dev blog. At the same time, many old versions of Tachiyomi were removed due to the non-free junrar lib used for RAR/CBR format (“Spring Cleaning”). We patched out the related code in 0.15.3.

@Licaon_Kter calls us to share news and files:

Fossify Phone is live, but you already know that as you’ve been refreshing the index daily for a week, haven’t you?

As seen in the pile of updates listed in last week’s TWIF the ebook reader KOReader was updated to v2024.01. What was not seen is that due to a network glitch not all of its per-architecture packages were built, only armv7 and x86, so most users (who is still using x86 on Android these days?) got updated to the armv7 version as their devices supported that. This week a new cycle built more apps, all listed below, and also the missing arm64 version of KOReader, so its users got a ping about a new update. But this would not be a paragraph in TWIF if this was the end of it, would it? No, apparently the app has a complex set of assets (for file formats, archives, etc) and the armv7 to arm64 update step, on certain devices or Android versions, might lead to KOReader failing to start. The developers are tracking the issue and the solution appears to be a simple uninstall and reinstall of the app.

OnionShare, Securely and anonymously share files using the Tor network, was recently included, making an otherwise complex task as easy as “Share to…“. The receiver still needs to have something like Tor Browser installed to actually download the files, but we hope the developers can integrate that too and have one powerful tool that takes care of everything (upstream issue).

In TWIF 2023, Week 47 we mentioned in passing that: “Organic Maps was updated… also brings experimental ‘Details on KAYAK’ affiliate link to hotels”. This new feature was noticed by many, who brought up the issue that “affiliate links” and “Ads” are kinda too close together to be ignored and that F-Droid should flag such as an anti-feature. The ensuing long thread is worth a read, spanning for one and a half months with two dozen users and devs discussing the meaning of words, quoting laws on different continents and trying to come up with UX and code in a way to have both the app development sponsored and the users not feel subjected to ads.

After a period of seemingly silence where nothing changed, the F-Droid team flagged the three affected versions with “Ads” making the description of the app a paradox, while the upstream text said “At Organic Maps, we value privacy:… * No Ads”, the F-Droid app details below listed the “Ads” antifeature. This made the users confused and upstream devs upset so they asked F-Droid to remove these versions altogether until further notice. So now Organic Maps: Hike, Bike, Drive Offline is downgraded from 2023.12.20-4-FDroid to 2023.09.22-27-FDroid.

Talking about maps, Organic Maps might have been developed as a reaction to the perceived issues of OsmAnd~, which is a great app in itself, but F-Droid contributors do a lot of heavy cleaning of unwanted features to bring it up to inclusion standards in each new version. Also on older devices OsmAnd~ might not even run, let alone get you out of the woods.

Given the extensive edits of the F-Droid build, each new OsmAnd~ version is initially marked as unstable/beta even if it’s deemed stable upstream. When the next version is released, the previous version is then marked as stable, and so will be offered as an update in the F-Droid client. If you want to try the very latest versions (e.g. 4.6.11, released today), you need to either manually update it or enable “Allow Beta Updates” from the app details upper-right menu.

Tips&Tricks: A feature that might get crippled in the cleaning is “OsmAnd Cloud”, which allows a limited set of the user data to be saved on the developer servers. For many this might be ok, but from a privacy point of view storing your Home and Mom favourite locations there might be a big no-no. Little known fact, but OsmAnd~ in F-Droid has enabled “All files access” permission, and when that is granted in Android Settings -> Apps -> Special app access, you can save all your data in a local storage folder and have backups of it via Syncthing or whatever privacy preserving file syncronization solution you like.

Spring Cleaning

As part of our tooling testing, we do full repo scans from time to time, The last one from mid-2022 proved to be a heavy hitter both to us and the apps devs (careful, it’s a veeeery long thread ahead). While “enumerating badness” has its issues (some call it dumb even), it’s human curated and given the centralized nature of libraries around Android (or better said Google) we end up in a “all roads lead to RomeGoogle” situation where ~28 files cover most of the proprietary dependencies or its users (found so far).

The current scan has ended and we are grep-ping through the logs. The current thread has the live feed of our findings as we go along between other tasks. Hence, apps already started being archived, having affected versions removed and sometimes all versions removed until upstream developers figure out fixes.

In no particular order, besides those listed by @linsui above:

Newly Added Apps

5 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

80 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂
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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 😉

Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX

Posted on by Michael G
Hindenburg alleged that when the Opera browser continued losing users (due to competition from Google and Apple), the company shifted gears to building mobile apps that provided predatory short-term loans. The interest rates on those loans ranged from 365-876% per year, and loan terms from 7-29 days. Opera also falsely advertised longer loan terms and lower interest rates in the app descriptions, because the Google Play Store had rules against predatory loan services. The loan apps specifically targeted customers in Kenya, India, and Nigeria. Hindenburg also confirmed through user reports and a former employee that two of the apps, OKash and OPesa, asked for permission to the phone contacts during the setup process. The service would then start sending threatening messages to the user’s contacts when a borrower was late on their payments. The issue was also covered by local media prior to Hindenburg’s report. The money from these loan apps amounted to 42.5% of Opera’s revenue by mid-2019. Yes, almost half of Opera’s revenue came from extracting money from people in developing countries with false advertising and direct harassment. ↫ Corbin Davenport As if this wasn’t horrible enough, Opera also pushed the usual crypto and NFT scams, and is now chasing that “AI” high by adding spicy autocomplete to its Chromium skin. Much like Brave – good people don’t let friends use Brave – Opera is just a veneer around shady business practices, and you just shouldn’t use this garbage. Just use Firefox.

Ricardo Nunes: “Não serão os cabos eleitorais que vão governar a cidade”

Posted on by Michael G
O prefeito de São Paulo, Ricardo Nunes, concedeu entrevista ao Jornal da Manhã e falou das eleições para Prefeitura de SP e sobre o aniversário de 470 anos da cidade. Assista ao Jornal da Manhã completo: https://youtube.com/live/jDHfBQa2WNM

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Smooth Jazz Music – Cozy Piano & Saxophone Jazz to relax, study and work

Posted on by Michael G
Smooth Jazz Music – Cozy Piano & Saxophone Jazz to relax, study and work, just give 1,5 hours listening smooth jazz music for balance mind and life.

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Peoples Blog: Create a custom Drupal Service and Use as a Helper

Posted on by Michael G
Creating a custom Drupal service allows you to encapsulate functionality and access it wherever needed, promoting modularity and reusability within your codebase as a Helper. In this article we are sharing an example of how to create a custom Drupal service and use it as a helper. Step 1: Define the Service Create a new custom module or use an existing one. Define your service in the module&rsq