The official client app is an essential piece of the F-Droid ecosystem.
Therefore, the Calyx Institute as a member and benefactor of the F-Droid
community offered to
sponsor a maintainer position to ensure continuous maintenance of the client
app independent of grants or available volunteer time.
The Calyx Institute suggested Torsten Grote as the first person they would
fund as a maintainer, due to his familiarity with the code base and due to
his substantial contributions in the past year. Calyx hopes that this would
free up time and energy of the current maintainer(s), so those could benefit
F-Droid in other areas.
The offer was discussed with the F-Droid community and the existing
maintainer(s). It was meanwhile approved and work is already
underway. The new F-Droid
Basic app variant of the
client enabling app updates without root or privileged extension is just one
example. The Calyx Institute hopes that this new maintainer role will
enable more external contributions to F-Droid and encourages other
benefactors of F-Droid to set up similar sponsorship agreements.
Other tasks of the maintainer include:
- Try to identify and fix bugs, prioritizing critical issues
- Responding to issues filed
- Reviewing and merging merge requests
- Continued improvements as the Android app landscape evolves
- Making releases as needed
F-Droid Basic
Announcing F-Droid
Basic. Testing and feedback
appreciated!
F-Droid Basic 1.17.0:
targetSdkset to 33 (Android 13), and a bump to 34 (Android 14) planned
soon.- Need to confirm updates only once per app, after that they’ll install
automatically in the background. - No extra privileges required!