Open Source

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 17 Oct 2024, Week 42

F-Droid core

I hope this note finds you in good health. By the time this post reaches you, final F-Droid Client and Basic 1.21.0 went live, but not yet suggested. Did you test the alpha releases? No? Let’s hope someone did on your special device and Android version combo, I mean I run bleeding edge here and it works fine. 🤷

The full changelog since the last alpha1 is:

• Fix race conditions when repositories are updated at the same time
• Don’t crash when Bluetooth permissions are missing
• Fix launching panic settings from Panic app (e.g. Ripple)
• Fix permission issue that prevented full and basic installed at same time
• Update UI if the repository disable warning is canceled

Nothing exciting, as expected, we’re polishing the experience in this 6 months long development cycle.

Based on your feedback, and more of our internal testing, this will be promoted to suggested soon.

Missed the gist about why 1.21.0 is great? Go read the week 40 intro and take a peek at the full changelog between releases.

Unfortunately there’s no targetSdkVersion bump with this new version, but the good news is that it looks like only the Bluetooth permission needs some fixes, so we are pretty close.

Since you want some drama and excitement, you can read about what the future will bring, as AndroidAuthority peeks into the F-Droid development and writes about “F-Droid being the first third-party app store to support Android 15’s app archiving feature”.

Community News

Did you know that the Internet was invented for cat pics? Yes, they even have their own domain name .cat and that’s a true story I swear! 😸

On a serious note, the Catalan community launched a call to action for a “Collaborative translation into Catalan of F-Droid”. This was back in July, and we missed it, but we see there’s a bit more work to do to reach that 100%, so another pair of eyes might be helpful anyway.

Element X – Secure Chat & Call was updated to 0.6.5 after 4 months of missing out, as the Element team worked to replace the components that made the app builds non-deterministic. Reproducible builds are harder to setup and maintain, but both teams understand their importance.

NextGIS Mobile, GIS that lets you create, edit and export geodata, both online and offline, was updated to 2.8.0 after an 8 year long pause. Thanks to @linsui for digging into old apps recipes and fixing them. This app had the Google Analytics code cleaned up.

Newly Added Apps

5 apps were newly added

• BinEd – Binary/Hex Editor: Editor for binary data (hex viewer/editor)
• Compose Stopwatch: Stopwatch in the Material You theme, designed for ease of use and best features
• DroidCrypt: A file and text encryption tool for Android
• FetchIt: An app that lets you download media files from YouTube, Twitter, etc
• Seers Lodge: A feature-rich P2P chat application that runs on the Tox protocol

Updated Apps

Autumn Cleaning

We are slowing down in the archiving department, then again we’ve never deep dived this much for years. All thanks to you, the contributors that help out!

We’ve added some recommendations for alternative apps in past TWIF posts too, if you expanded the full list and checked them out, but if you have better ones feel free to reach out and we can update these lists for future reference.

You can read week 38th TWIF explanatory section for more details about why archiving happens.

Archived Apps

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF, and for your patience while we maintain and polish the F-Droid experience. 🙂

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