We’ve created a prototype of a progressive web app for browsing F-Droid
repositories. It’s built with
Flutter, which is really great for working in rapid
development cycles. It also allows us to make it look and feel like a
modern Android app. As a trade-off the web-app is pretty big in size (~ 10
MB). So depending on your internet connection speed loading it for the
first time might take a while. Flutter is also notorious for trying to
connect to Google servers, and we couldn’t figure out how to make the app
GDPR compliant just yet.
Since it’s a just an early prototype, it’s nowhere near as complete as our
official Android app.
Right now it only has some of the most basic features: Displaying basic
repository informations; Providing a link/QR-code for adding the repository
to your F-Droid client; Browsing and searching for apps; Displaying app
details and app downloads.
F-Droid repositories themselves are deployed like web-sites. So naturally
it’s possible to deploy this web-app into any F-Droid repository and
instantly make it browse-able on the web. We’re considering adding an
option for deploying it automatically to our tools for managing F-Droid
repositories.
The tooling that runs the F-Droid community can easily be applied to other
platforms like iOS. Our team came up with an
experimental
solution for shipping iOS apps using F-Droid repositories. So our new PWA
opens up an opportunity to explore how F-Droid could offer a tiny taste of
freedom to iOS users. While we hope to aid the expansion of free software
everywhere, even on proprietary platforms like iOS, F-Droid will only ship
on platforms that can be free software, like Android.
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