Open Source

Stories about grants, stats and JCenter

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TWIF generated on Thursday, 08 Aug 2024, Week 32

F-Droid core

It’s no secret that F-Droid continues to live and thrive thanks in part to you, the users that donate, but also in part thanks to different grants we’ve received along these 14 years of existence. Our recent post covered the endangered NGI program and its importance.

The Guardian Project has been a long time supporter of F-Droid, pouring in not only grant money but also human resources. They are now looking for a part-time Grant Administrator so if you find the list of their achievements tempting and your skills match the bullet points, don’t be shy and get in contact. Who knows, maybe you can be featured here next. 😛

Back in May we’ve highlighted the work contributors around F-Droid have done in order to shine a light onto the app downloads stats. The Divested (thanks!) hosted page just got an update, covering the weeks since then: https://divestos.org/pages/fdroid_stats

/PS: if you are involved with the project(s) that download Termux packages 300.000 times per week, two advices: first, do get in contact with us because we’re curious about your work, and second please try to setup a round robin script of sorts that downloads from mirrors instead since we have plenty of those and it’s not in anyone’s benefit that you download 25-30Tb of data from our servers each and every week. 😐

Community News

F-Droid has been using Maven repos in its builds given that developers love to depend on them, but also because rebuilding everything from source is a lengthy process, not yet perfected for the reproducible future we want to reach. We’ve chosen to trust a limited number of repos and also flag any misstep in their contents with an extra layer of verification. Two years ago we’ve explained a bit more on why we do this, in a post.

At the start of 2021 one such big Maven repo, JCenter, announced that it was closing “soon”, but the developers pleaded for an extension receiving at least read-only access. We’ve hoped that, this being known, developers will choose in time to move their libraries to other Maven repos, or choose to use other libs from other repos. Hence 3 years have passed, but this appears to have never happened, our current running cycle yielded apps failing to find their dependencies hosted on JCenter, and we expect more and more to fail.

The article “JCenter Sunset on August 15th, 2024” explains the timeline, the “why” and the next steps devs can take. Now that the ‘the chickens come home to roost’ we expect updates to be delayed as developers rush to change dependencies, integrate the old ones or refactor as needed.

In the chaos that will ensue, we want to remind developers that, while it’s easy to fish some JAR or AAR files from your Gradle caches, stuff them in libs/ and call it a day, the inclusion policy governs over updates too, so make sure everything is replaced with equally FLOSS things. 😉

Latest “cleaning” hit Bilibili clients hard. PipePipe is still standing, but a new challenger was just included, bilimiao, Original Bilibili Time Machine.

Back in April, André Staltz, the main Manyverse developer posted their last update on the project blog, and while the app has not seen updates in F-Droid for years, there was this glimmer of hope that eventually the NodeJS and NDK planets will align and the app would be buildable again. The app repo is now under new management and they’ve decided to switch focus away from the underlying protocol making the app resurrection a hard task. You can read about the future of the protocol in a post here. F-Droid archived the app, but we’ll keep an eye on the future endeavors coming out of these projects.

LibreTrack was updated to 1.4.1 but this version had an issue making it unusable. If you didn’t update, use the menu to skip this version. 1.4.2 will come in a few days.

Newly Added Apps

5 more apps were newly added
  • AniVu – All-in-one app for RSS, BitTorrent dl & play
  • Book’s Story – Dive into the world of adventure as you discover your favorite book’s story!
  • Capy Reader – A smallish RSS reader
  • MemoryGuardian – Take Control of Your Clipboard
  • Nutrixious – Calories management from foods and physical trainings

Updated Apps

153 more apps were updated

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Apple memory holed its broken promise for an OCSP opt-out

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When you launch an app, macOS connects to Apple’s OCSP service to check whether the app’s Developer ID code signing certificate has been revoked by Apple. In November 2020, Apple’s OCSP service experienced a mass outage, preventing Mac users worldwide from launching apps. In response and remedy to this outage, Apple made several explicit promises to Mac users in a support document, which can still be seen in a Wayback Machine archive from September 24, 2023. ↫ Jeff Johnson One of the explicit promises Apple made was that it would allow macOS users to turn off phoning home to Cupertino every time you launch an application on macOS. It’s four years later now, and this promise has not been kept – Apple still does not allow you to turn off phoning home. In fact, it turns out that last year, Apple scrubbed this promise from all of its documentation, hoping we’re all going to forget about it. In other words, Apple is never going to allow its macOS users to stop the operating system from phoning home to Cupertino every time you launch an application. Even though the boiling frog story is nonsensical, it’s apt here. More and more Apple is limiting its users’ control over macOS, locking it down to a point where you’re not really the owner of your computer anymore. Stuff like this gives me the creeps.

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