F-Droid News

This week hastily compiled by Bubu. I probably missed things.

F-Droid is a repository of verified free and open source Android apps, a client to access it, as well as a whole “app store kit”, providing all the tools needed to set up and run an app store. It is a community-run free software project developed by a wide range of contributors. This is their story this past week.

F-Droid core

• Torsten has been further involved in fixing reproducible builds for Android. He opened an issue with Google about the non reproducible ressources.arsc file. The issue apparently now got assigned to somebody and Google bumped the priority and added it to some internal hotlists. There is also a thread about this on the reproducible builds mailing list.

Community News

• Long time contributor of liberated app forks thermatk has been hard at work to provide a source-built version of the Chromium browser. The project is aptly called Unobtanium. It’s been quite a ride but apparently the project is finished apart from a few final touches it’s all done! This is still pending inclusion into F-Droid but apart from Chromium this will allow having a webview component built and updated by F-Droid! Contributors to this project welcome!

New apps

• Keyboard Switcher by Kunzisoft: Simple keyboard switcher with a floating button
• p≡p: Read and write encrypted e-mails, more info here
• PSLab: Pocket Science Lab Android interface for PSLab hardware
• Aurora Store by Rahul Patel: Download apks from Google Play Store, Aurora Store provides a Material UI to Yalp Store. It’s been called a better interface to the play store than the play store. :-)
• PaperCraft: A Material Design inspired space shooter

Updated apps

As usual more updates than we can list here, some highlights include:

• Huge DeltaChat update to v0.18.0
• Telegram-FOSS security update due to lots of ffmpeg vulnerabilities.
• The Déjá Vu Location Service has been updated to v1.1.7, fixing a rare crash.
• Kontalk got updated to v4.1.5 with major performance improvements and some crash and other fixes.

In the next TWIF

Expect your usual TWIF author, Coffee to be back next week.

As usual, please report interesting updates. There are way too many app updates to keep track of them all, so we need your help to highlight the most interesting changes. And of course, we love to hear about all things involving F-Droid in some way.

Please tell us in the TWIF submission thread on the forum, or tag your update #fdroid on Mastodon. (And cc @fdroidorg@mastodon.technology to make sure it reaches our instance.) The deadline to the next TWIF is Thursday 28 June 2018, 12:00 UTC.

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