Why not download source, (review, edit) and compile on the device, e.g., using Termux
Is "convenience" the rationale for the F-Droid app
Maybe it's the same rationale that drives Linux users toward "binary package managers"
Learning UNIX on BSD instead of Linux may have biased me toward compiling software myself. I know that others may prefer to download and install binaries
But with a project like F-Droid the founding principle seems to be that closed source apps, and Google's Play Store data collection scheme, should be avoided. If that's true, then it makes sense for users to compile their own apps, if they can. Why not encourage and faciltate user review and compilation of app source code
Then, for those users, there's no need for an F-Droid app or efforts to try to hide it
It's too bad app source code generally isn't mirrored publicly like, e.g., BSD or Linux software, using the same public mirrors. (Many are run by universities, not corporations) If there are exceptions, such as F-Droid, the number of mirrors for app source code is relatively small
Syncthing-For
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There's so much worse out there. This at least looks functional and shouldn't hurt anyones' eyes.
Anyway, this is a FOSS project. Anyone could go and work with them to clean up the design.
https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/text/style-...
The old f-droid client made selecting app updates easy. With both v2 and droid-ify, you have to click through for each app. Not a great interface decision :( Why do updates always dumb interfaces down these days?
After 10 years of F-droid, I'm bummed I only found droid-ify a couple of months ago. Sooo much better than F-droid.
That newspeak term should just disappeared. It only contributes to the image that downloading and installing an app is something that is outside the "happy path". Installing software of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be demonised
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
Blocking apps is like blocking buying of knifes because one can hurt themselves.
"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.
There's not an easy answer, but the non-answer of "people just need to be educated" is trivially dismissed.
That device was called personal computer for decades, and the world didn't end for the simplicity of installing software on it.
To be fair, mobile phones being locked down probably contributed to the mass adoption of e.g. mobile payments and banking.
The move to apps made things more difficult, if anything
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
Society didn't ban doing it, but put up barriers that help the average person from doing something dangerous.
It doesn't mean one can't buy nice things because one is afraid of being robbed.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
Google's own Play Store is filled with outright malware too, no ads needed. The idea that Google has to control what people are allowed to install on their phones isn't really for the protection of anyone except Google.
Knowing Google, that's a big assumption
There are occasional good deals for (unused) older models on eBay, but they're surprisingly rare.
I wonder if Google demands stores to give the old models back, after the release of newer ones; they disappear from every store extremely quickly.
In short, google has referred to this as "increased user friction" to try and deter people from doing this. Essentially not making it impossible; just really frustrating for users so they get sick of the process and just install verified apps through them.
The only way I know around this is to install a custom rom like GrapheneOS or Lineage OS since this change targets Because the policy targets the Google Mobile Services (GMS) framework rather than the foundational Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Irrespective, people should probably be migrating to a GrapheneOS or similar OS asap once the OS ships with a device.
If you want a cross platform option that's pretty good across Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux, Readest[1] Is another great option. It supports syncing a library of ebooks and is AGPL licensed[2].
[1]: https://readest.com/
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid...
Once your used to it, the controls are a lot better than stock kindle as well imo.
The only options are stripping the DRM from kobo books or piracy, last I checked.
haha, I kid. I... kid. :(
# update repo lists
fdr update
# upgrade all apps on the connected device
fdr upgrade
# search packages
fdr search vlc # lists org.videolan.vlc
# install on the device
fdr install org.mozilla.firefox
# download the apk
fdr download org.mozilla.firefox
# uninstall
fdr uninstall org.mozilla.firefox
A few days passed, and I eventually get a notification from NewPipe prompting for an update. But I can't install it just yet, because of mismatching signatures between the F-Droid and GitHub versions (yes, that's the point, I know...). The F-Droid build took so long to release, that in the meantime, another version of NewPipe came out...
It would perhaps be nice if yt-dlp could eject it's youtube api handling into it's own project that is then augmented to handle anything youtube related and turns into THE library for dealing with youtube.. maybe even call it libyt :)
I tried it with 3 random apps for a while, but instantly got into issues. Two stopped updating due to Obtanium falling behind how app releases - for instance, developer changed version numbering scheme but Obtanium didn't expect that, so an outdated version was always presented. It wasn't fixed for quite a while.
Then I discovered https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ which makes it very easy. I feel like Obtainium should make this more obvious. It would help adoption a lot.
And if you see anything is missing, you can always add it!
Am I missing something stupid?
Still, excited for when it'll be ready.
The Aurora project accepts donations, if you want to hurry things along some time! And they have a donation button right there in the app listing, try doing that for yourapp in the PlayStore and see who comes knocking in 3...2..1 to make you a non-person.
The user experience was just too broken for too long to consider it usable (didn't support background updates for about two years after Google made it available, and generally just too much jank and random errors/failures). I might look into it the next time I'm setting up a device, but I think for the majority of apps I'll still go through the Play store - I don't trust F-Droid to be stable/reliable enough yet.
This means you're definitely awake.
I'm being sarcastic.
It is not my main device, nor even my secondary device. It’s basically just a device I bought for cheap hoping that maybe I was lucky and it was actually pretty snappy. It’s not snappy :(
I occasionally watch a couple of YouTube videos on it and read a couple of HN posts on it, when my phone is out of battery or when I’m doing a backup of my phone and have left the phone on the table for that.
Anyway, aside from YouTube the other apps I have installed on it myself are all from F-Droid, including the DuckDuckGo browser that I use on it. I also have Signal on it, which I don’t remember if I installed from F-Droid or from Google Play.
My main device that I actually use a lot is an iPhone. And like I said I basically only use the tablet like a couple of hours a week and only to watch a couple of YouTube videos and read a couple HN threads, when I am not able to use my phone for those things.
Unfortunately there are APP providers actively preventing their apps to work on graphene OS, so i own an extra use@home cheap broken glass iphone for these mandatory but non-graphene apps.
It is a pain and it is getting worse... I'm really tempted to get back to the Apple ecosystem for less shens but currently i cannot do this yet... It just feels wrong but the pain is real. I'm Lösung the fight of investing too mich of my time in things that just should work.
I need banking and bunch of vendor related apps. I need play store for them; so not full on f-droid repos. But close-ish when it comes to phone functionality.
You lose all that if you go directly to source.
If there's a good enough app on there, I generally stick with that as opposed to trying what Google Play has to offer.
I like having that prefiltering, knowing that the app will be open source, not trying to pull anything shady and not have ads or sell my data. On the Play Store, more often than not, at least one of those is not true.
2. Please donate a few EUR/bucks to F-Droid! It's a good place to get Android apps from, and we can't all just mooch off of it. Doesn't have to be a big donation.
3. I am worried that Alpahbet/Google will kill these "unauthorized" apps soon, so that the new version arriving would be kind of bittersweet. Although - maybe I'll just need to switch to LineageOS or something.
- go to F-Droid -> Updates. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- refresh the repositories. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- search directly for f-droid in apps. "This app was built for an older version of Android and cannot be updated automatically."
*facepalm* never change, F-Droid. You might not be able to automatically update the app because of Android API restrictions, but there's no reason your app can't tell me it knows there's an updated version I could be asked to apply manually, is there?
EDIT: it still says version 1.23.2 is "Suggested" even when 2.0 is installed. Perhaps this is a reason? Nonetheless, there's no setting to choose a different version policy, i.e. install 2.0 because it's newer, even if not "Suggested"
What does "Suggested" even mean? According to https://forum.f-droid.org/t/how-does-f-droid-suggest-a-versi... it's set manually by the person maintaining the metadata, which makes it even more of a facepalm if F-Droid are announcing 2.0 on their homepage but nobody set CurrenVersion=2.0 in their own metadata.
This is a shame. Is the privileged extension a large maintenance burden?
F-Droid took until now to use those APIs.
Even greater HN conversation about all the to-me-unknown alternatives. I used neostore as a replacement, but maybe time to try f-Droid again
I heard of fdriod but what I think it may only serves feature less, low UI/UX optimized apps. So didn't installed it yet. But something should be available where people can find all Play store apps (as aurora supplies) + premium/adsense deleted modified apps (random website) + Open source apps (fdroid)…… this will make android insane
I'm using that with 2.0 (or rather with F-droid Basic, but I noticed Basic was updated to the same that is described in article, but a while ago). It works just fine.
Google has for years censored app reviews anyway on its Play Store, and also allowed too many low-value reviews which drown out useful reviews.
The answer to freedom isn't another marketplace. It's legislation that requires Google and Apple to allow web installs without scare walls or deeply hidden permission toggles.
You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
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Edit because of rate limits:
This is not derogatory. This is making the point that the wrong battle is being fought. F-droid fans are cheering a small victory, yet losing the entire war.
F-droid does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's not the point. The point is the app store monopoly. That there are only two platforms and that both are almost completely locked down.
F-droid users don't even see that Google is purposefully allowing this as an antitrust sponge in their calculus. Google doesn't mind because 0.0001% of their users will install this. If they had a sense that the regulators wouldn't bother them, they'd just as well close this loophole. And they probably will eventually.
This isn't beachhead, and even if it was, it isn't sound footing or a stable foundation. It can easily go away.
This seems weirdly derogatory towards people that use F-Droid.
> put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
at all. I feel like I install apps from the store, and use them. So I'm confused by both "hours of time" and "altruism".
What? I'm not sure how you would manage to waste hours installing a single app and then using it to install other apps, and I'm not using it because of "altruism" (what does that even mean?), I'm using it because it's the best way to get apps.
> You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
> There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
Even if you 100% trust Android's sandboxing and permissions, which is... not a choice I would personally make, I like it when my apps don't have scams or ads internally, either. I'm not worried about Grandma downloading any app off F-Droid; I am a little concerned about what happens if she can download any app being pushed by any random website.
First hit for 'check http headers', in case that helps find out why websites think you want Chinese content. Maybe it's a bug in the website; maybe it's set as your first preference. Please report the bug if there is one!
I have no idea why it selected Mandarin. I can switch back to English by using the "desktop site" feature that _does_ have a language dropdown.
No, this increases the overall complexity of the system. Android will hopefully eventually collapse under its own weight.
Could you explain? I don't understand what you mean here. https://f-droid.org/F-Droid.apk is signed by the same key that signs https://f-droid.org/repo/entry.jar