Soon to be modern

Posted on by Michael G

Author: Licaon_Kter
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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 04 Jul 2024, Week 27

F-Droid core

Reproducible builds are a new focus for F-Droid, we’re talking about 2 years new, versus all of our 14. And while it’s a harder path to take, about 9% of our hosted apps are signed by the upstream developers, we are sure it’s the best one forward and we insist on checking this on every new inclusion. That being said, we wish the hardest thing a developer needs to do when this status has been reached is to keep safe their keys but it’s not that easy, the list is long.

In the past week we’ve seen more apps failing to verify reproducibly not because our build and the developer’s one were different but because the signed packages have some “garbage added”. We’ve narrowed it to a specific setup: apps signed by apksigner from build-tools >= 35.0.0-rc1, based on developers that build on Github Actions CI using their latest Ubuntu image. For now we’ve asked developers to try and sign with apksigner from the older 34.0.0 version.

We’re tracking this issue in #3299 and in apksigcopier issue 105.

And some good news, F-Droid Client UI has been stuck in Material-land-circa-2016 for a while now. Even back then the newly modern design split the community in two. But time passed, user got accustomed, Material Design language evolved, and voices started to raise again and ask for a modernization.

F-Droid contributor @proletarius101 has been hacking away at bringing the Client into 2024 with the minimal changes needed, and it looks pretty fine so far. What’s missing to get it done? There’s a question of “shared aesthetic vocabulary before actualizing the colors 😎”, basically we’re in the “bike-shedding” stage, and we hope it won’t take long. You can see the new design at work and read the proposals so far in the actual merge request, and we’re open to your feedback via our usual contact channels.

Community News

We’re off to a new round of “seasonal cleaning”, the first casualty is Wikipedia, Official feature-rich viewer of the free online encyclopedia, which was downgraded to r/2.7.50324-?//r-2020-06-29. Many others will fall in the next week as we are perusing the output of a fresh F-Droid SUSS scan, armed with updated signatures based on the work of our past long time contributor @IzzyDroid.

Don’t be sad if you see your favorite app downgraded in the next TWIF, it’s all for a good cause, to get them all more free than before. Stay tuned for more info!

Not mentioned last week, but Standard Notes, An end-to-end encrypted note-taking app for digitalists and professionals, also got the “cleaning” treatment, old versions got purged, yet thanks to @linsui’s work the app is back and we didn’t miss a beat.

K-9 Mail was updated to beta 6.904, so if you’re living the dangerous live do update as many reported crashes in previous builds.

PiliPala was updated to 1.0.24 but its code is still based on older 1.0.22, as after this version the app developers did not release new versions as open-source.

Newly Added Apps

13 apps were newly added
  • APM – Third-party Bilibili music player
  • Amber – Nostr event signer for Android
  • BlastOff – Casual endless runner featuring vector graphics
  • blichess – Play lichess games over Bluetooth
  • Colemak Mod-DH Keyboard – Colemak Mod-DH layout for physical keyboards connected via USB
  • FocusMastodon – A bright and colourful Mastodon client
  • FocusPodcast – A quality podcast management and playback application
  • GPTMobile – Your all in one chat assistant – Chat with multiple LLMs at once!
  • Keysh – Volume buttons handler
  • MMRL – The ultimate manager for Magisk, KernelSU, and APatch
  • NFC Quick Settings – View NFC status, and quickly access NFC settings, from the Quick Settings menu
  • Parti – Help with partitioning into fractional parts (compute lcm)
  • ServerBox – A server status & toolbox app using Flutter

Updated Apps

122 more apps were updated

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