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.
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?
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https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
I don't really need app to discover other apps, I need app to install/update the apps I already know.
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I appreciate all the hard work that goes into F-Droid <3
But fdroid is GOAT. They could make me hand type the exact app I want and I'm sure the app will be better than the ad ridden play store equivalent.
I let my kids have phones on road trips and I only installed educational games from fdroid.
No concern they will click buttons that are going to attempt to make a purchase or go to an external Web site.
Same story with guitar tuner apps.
They just work.
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid...
# 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
Syncthing-For
k
> F-Droid: Repo timestamp expected 1790110069568, but was 1790205675224 IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repo: Repo timestamp expected 1790100093000, but was 1790272636000
The real problem I think is who should this message go to? My guess is we don't want to have mindless telemetry going from every single user to some central database or repository somewhere. My injection isn't even privacy here. It is that when we have lots of data coming from all over the world, I am afraid someone still has to sift through all this data and make sense of it but we can only understand and prioritize things we already know or are at least able to understand. I feel like this is pulling us in different directions — we want a simpler interface but we also want to expose all sorts of application states that require advanced understanding of how the system works. And someone needs to decide which bucket any particular message goes to — perhaps there is a more opaque but less frightening message like "sync had a hiccup, will retry" or even no message at all surfaces to the user unless it fails multiple consecutive times for the simple, default bucket and more verbose more frequent messages for those who want to see them?
But then even as I write this I can feel like this adds more maintenance headache, even as I push decision making to avoid having to think about a default, I still have to think about a default. The more I think about it, the less sure I am.
What are you favorite gems in F-Droid?
Standard Notes for sync'd notetaking: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.standardnotes/
Anyway, this might all become moot very soon if Google prevents us from installing anything from 3rd-party sources.
Are people actively using F-Droid categories to find new apps? I don't think I know anyone who does, and I've only ever used the search functionality.
1752624000 | Compiling C/C++ code with ndk-build | https://nyxfault.github.io/posts/Android-NDK/
1785024000 | Lightweight, self-contained APK builder for Termux, no Gradle | https://github.com/CrimsonCurious/vexel
........^1 | Building Android applications in Termux using Gradle | https://grokipedia.com/page/Building_Android_applications_in...
1. Where is the date for articles on this wiki
I never got around to trying the Copperhead successor in Graphene.
Good on fdroid. Will be removing neostore and going back to fdroid.
This is a shame. Is the privileged extension a large maintenance burden?
Still, excited for when it'll be ready.
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.
Am I missing something stupid?
- 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.
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
One of the reasons I went with Android over an iPhone. If F-Droid stops working I am done with Android.
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
Some of the apps are really good.
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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.
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No, this increases the overall complexity of the system. Android will hopefully eventually collapse under its own weight.
Why not download source, review, (edit) and compile on the device, e.g., using Termux, Gradle and Android cmdline-tools
Is "convenience" the rationale for the F-Droid app
Maybe it's the same rationale that drives Linux users toward "binary package managers"
Sometim... err more times than not... there should be a "Your IQ must be at least this high" bar for good software. Stop appealing to the lower common denominators!
FYI the obtainx sources current list is: Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN).
I only ever used Github so far.
VS
"APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub"
so 3 chinese app stores vs APKMirror, APKPure and Aptoide, I think I'd trust more APKM over the rest, personally I update only from Github/Fdroid and APKPure/Aptoide I have disabled
Where exactly would the UI benefit from "drawing lines"? I'd say the visual hierarchy is rather obvious.
I'll say more: most separators people use in their UIs are completely unnecessary. They should be used sporadically when you don't have a better way of segmenting the interface.
> No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap
What section of the UI are you referring to exactly? From the screenshots in their blog post it seems to me like the visual hierarchy is preserved and without using the app at least I can form an immediate expectation as to the function of each button. (And what is clickable and what isn't)
> no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off
What type of indication would you like to see here? I think most users intuitively understand that visual cue. An always-on scrollbar would introduce unnecessary clutter..
Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.
Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.
Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.
Just like "customers keep running into our glass door" doesn't imply approval of glass and it doesn't mean you should turn everything into glass.
Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.
Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.
It is really disappointing how much critique it gets, people complaining about stuff that has been bad for 15 years, but apparently the same people who were annoyed by it never contributed to fix it. I guess open source mentality is something else.
Also: while it is released, it is not yet marked as recommended. So I needed to upgrade manually. I assume they do this to get some feedback from early adopters. So I think people should either just wait or contribute.
You still need judgment, many negative reviews come from people who don't understand the app and where the problem comes from outside the app control. Common with apps that interface with hardware, for example, if you have a remote control app that makes use of a IR blaster, some people will complain that it doesn't work, but that's just because they don't have a IR blaster. But some are clear red flags like "wants me to create an account for not good reason", "intrusive ads", regular mentions of crashes or "since the last version..." comments which suggest enshittification.
Once your used to it, the controls are a lot better than stock kindle as well imo.
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 licensed under the AGPL[2].
[1]: https://readest.com/
Supposedly it can interface with various sync providers, but I've not tried this myself. The rendering is lovely.
For example, my usage now only ever goes like this:
1- Open Librera. Presented with a scrollable page of all book covers.
2- Scroll down to the epub I'm currently reading. Tap it once.
3- Resumes the book where I left off, with previous view settings. In my case full screen text with zero UI (tap once to hide the UI).
Unfortunately I have had to go proprietary and use readera premium, which works fine for epubs.
You can thank me later (in 20 years).
The only options are stripping the DRM from kobo books or piracy, last I checked.
Piracy and stripping DRMs though definitely work.
While we're on their subject, Amazon customer service chat can only be done on the app, not on browser on mobile.
The future is now!
I also noticed that Google gets really offended if you turn off auto updates, and nags you hard to turn it back on.
Settings, System, Software Updates, App updates
Bonus that any OS or Google services updates are here too
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https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/text/style-...
> Should be a default
Meaning the developer should opt-in to this explicitly but choose it as the default option. The actual default is no strategy at all.
Good design would do absolutely nothing for me.
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haha, I kid. I... kid. :(
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 :)
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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.
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.
And if you see anything is missing, you can always add it!
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
Then it starts a 24 hour timer. When that hits zero, you have 1 hour to go back in and select that you want to install apps on a device you own and paid money to own.
It's not scam-resistant at all. Any scammer will gladly work around this and send someone to one of many malicious apps in the play store, or a malicious URL, or even just set an appointment to call Grandma back the next day.
But yeah, it's hilarious that they're pushing this so hard when the Google Play Store still has so much malware.
But dear... Google has no idea that they have/had the genuine nerds and are blowing it.
Knowing Google, that's a big assumption
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).
Not that Apple is better, but they lose a huge selling point.
Then you have to explain to users how to enable this. Not too mention the onerous F-droid requirements for publishing, it's bad enough as it is.
Average users are not going to do this, just like Google wants. Hopefully someone sues them and wins or we get Linux phones, not holding my breath though
Irrespective, people should probably be migrating to a GrapheneOS or similar OS asap once the OS ships with a device.
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.
This means you're definitely awake.
I'm being sarcastic.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
F-Droid took until now to use those APIs.
> Android provides two APIs for installing apps: a “privileged” API for things built in, and a “session” API for third-party apps. The built-in API provides key UX improvements, but is quite restricted due to the security architecture. The third-party API is not used by Google at all, and therefore it is buggy and receives sub-par maintenance. Also, Google is motivated to keep it lower quality since all apps that use it are inherently competitors to Google Play. The additional system prompts and potential instability owing to frequent changes in Google’s SDK requirements may frustrate users, particularly those who are not tech-savvy.
Other things not mentioned:
- updating applications with adb or the package installer (e.g. by downloading and opening the APK) seems to force F-Droid to show the dialog again
- applications are not eligible if their minimum API version is too low, meaning you get a prompt on every update
All in all I see no reason to put up with subpar installation UX just because Google doesn't endorse the store I use.
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.
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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.
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.
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
Redundancy would be fine. It would help in edge-cases like that.
It'll show you updates you haven't done since whatever time period I haven't figured out, but to actually check, from there you have to click 'Manage', then 'Updates available', then 'Check for updates.'
Typically, I have nothing waiting for me in updates, and have to do the above to expose 8 or so apps with updates available.
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Bad design forces the human brain to do a lot of the type of processing that it's bad at (eg arbitrary symbolic remapping).
Are you talking about pre-2.0 versions?
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.
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.
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.
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Getting some 9-11 security theater vibes.
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.
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.
> 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".
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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.
Without regulation markets coalesce as the winners eat each other like a game of snake. It's a miracle Apple hasn't yet eliminated Android. Although I suppose for some institutions there is only iPhone.
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.
Now my in-laws (similar age) one very demented, the other thinks he knows best because he was a chemical engineer...they could use some built in protections
so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.
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.
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Given that google is now forced to have competing app stores due to Epic v. Google and the ninth circuit courts went into long and arduous detail in that anti-trust case about sideloading restrictions I don't think they have a leg to stand on if they get rid of sideloading completely. Oddly Apple continues to get away with it no problem.
Family should be responsible on education or making phone of people that are not educated enough (minors, elderly, etc.) limited - I do that using Family Link. I have there my child and also my in-laws - both of them can't install new apps without my permission.
So the tech is already there, one just needs to use it.
The logical conclusion is that fdroid should be allowed and google play banned by default.
And I generally wouldn't care "have at it" if their phone/computer being compromised only harmed them. But a bulk amount of compromised devices harms us all.
"Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that!" -George Carlin
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/computers...
Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.
Maybe with less brain cells burned by
And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
It's now that a lot of people can't use any remote banking, because their bank's app is huge or refuses to run on their phone.
The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.
FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.
Society didn't ban doing it, but put up barriers that help the average person from doing something dangerous.
I think the pumps still fit where I live, btw
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
If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.
Making the nozzle shapes incompatible is a smart solution, but in the US at least I'm pretty sure they're interchangeable.