F-Droid News

This Week In F-Droid 37, Week 1, 2019

In this edition: Happy New Year, @Izzy’s third F-Droid article on-line and Europe to fund bug bounties for 15 open source programs. There are 11 new and 72 updated apps, with a major release for UserLAnd.

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.

Happy New Year

It’s a new year! The F-Droid team wishes you a great 2019 in health, prosperity and freedom.

@Izzy’s third F-Droid article on-line

@Izzy writes:

Always wanted to run your own F-Droid repo – but were afraid it’s too complicated? No longer, as part 3 of my @fdroidorg series shows:

Your own F-Droid Repository with Repomaker

Europe to fund bug bounties for 15 open source programs

Starting in January, the European Commission is going to fund bug bounty programs for a number of open source projects, as part of the FOSSA project. Projects include Drupal, Notepad++, and of interest to F-Droid users: VLC.

(via @kuketzblog)

New apps

• DCipher: Secret text with 100% offline encryption.
• arXiv eXplorer
• Vanilla Metadata Fetch: Vanilla music player metadata retrieval plugin.
• apps_Packages Info: Updated applicationsinfos with colors & mini-tags (and basic fixes).
• Classical Music Tagger: A plain audio file metadata editor especially for classical music.
• Tri Peaks Solitaire for Android: Solitaire card game.
• My Wifi Passwords: View your wi-fi passwords.
• Meritous: Dungeon crawl game.
• PhoneTrack
• 35C3 Wifi Setup: Official noc application for connecting to the 35c3 wifi.
• SuperUStats

Updated apps

In total, 72 apps were updated this week. Here are the highlights:

• DAVdroid is now known as DAVx⁵. You can read more about this here. It was also updated from 2.0.7-ose to 2.1-ose, removing the “Accounts may be gone after rebooting” startup dialog, and offering several smaller changes and bug fixes, and behind-the-scenes changes.

• A Time Tracker lets you easily track how much time you spend on various activities. After 2½ years of inactivity, it updated to 0.50, moving all menu items to the Settings menu on the main screen, improving its F-Droid listing and making under-the-hood changes to its build process.

• QKSMS was updated from 3.5.4 to 3.6.1, adding the ability to share contact cards and to share multiple images directly from other apps. It also features an updated search bar style, faster startup, more detailed MMS summary, contact photo in notifications, and several bug fixes.

• FOSS Browser 6.1.1 is out, with an overview instead of startPage, order and filter bookmarks, edit url of bookmark, open favorite website on start, Code of Conduct site, and a Privacy Declaration. There are updates to the adBlock hosts list, help dialog, and French and Portugese translations. Beyond that you’ll find many more fixes and improvements.

• Yaacc lets you play media from UPNP/DLNA devices on your network, and lets UPNP/DLNA devices play media from your phone. This update to 2.1.0 will activate the device when unplugged in order to prevent device suspend; it will display cover art, current item and next item in the network player; and it adds new app icons.

• Mastalab keeps moving at light speed, as it updates from 1.50.3 to 1.62.1. This update includes Pixelfed readyness, although it requires something to be changed on the Pixelfed side as well. This change is expected to land any day now.

Also adds ability to: * Mix tag timelines (Any of these words/All of these words/None of these words) - Your instance needs to support it (next Mastodon release) * Rename tag timelines * Follow Misskey instances * Open XMPP links and emails with external applications (custom fields) * Set custom icons for videos & GIF media * Display “follow request sent” in profile for locked accounts (undo the follow + flag)

• KISS launcher’s update to 3.7.0 adds an AMOLED black theme.

• Riot.im 0.8.21 made it into F-Droid, with the following improvements:

  • Show userId below display name in member detail screen (#2756)
  • Clicking on a user and a room avatar opens a new screen with animation to view the avatar in full screen, with zoom capabilities (#2455)
  • Added Troubleshoot Notification settings page
  • Added badge to indicate number of group invitations on the Home Screen (#1923)

This release also contains many bug fixes, and improvements to notification code.

• Markor is a text editor centered around simple markup formats like Markdown and todo.txt for note-taking and list management. Version 1.6.0 is out and comes with a way to insert date and/or time, and adds the website title when sharing into Markor. For more improvements and fixes, see the author’s blog post.

• SleepyWifi brings back “turn Wi-Fi off when the phone is in sleepmode” for Android 8.1. It updated from 1.1 to 1.3, adding a foreground notification, a 10-second delay for the notification, a Dutch translation and an “About” screen. Known bug: the app sometimes fails to re-enable Wi-Fi.

• Your local weather was updated from 4.5.3 to 4.6.3, adding per-widget location setting and settings for graphs and weather forecast, a combined graph and widgets with combined graph. Also fixes negative temperature in notifications, and weather forecast in widget.

• Manyverse is a very different messenger than you’re used to, because it works locally and off-grid. If you are unfamiliar with Manyverse and its underlying protocol, Secure Scuttlebutt, you should probably read this background article.

This update from 0.1811.14-beta to 0.1901.2-beta brings the following new features: * add notes on internet p2p invite codes * delete an internet p2p invite code * re-share an internet p2p invite code * block profiles, publicly or secretly

And fixes: * navigation bug between profile screens * UI glitch in profile screen * Wi-Fi discovery and sync on some devices

Other improvements include quicker startup when user has many P2P invites and showing an informative text when loading takes too long.

• Major UserLAnd lets you run GNU/Linux Distros on Android - no root required. It updated to version 2.0.0, adding a built-in terminal to UserLAnd. (Version 2.1.0 is expected in F-Droid soon and should fix crashes in the new terminal.)

Beta updates

The following updates won’t be automatically suggested to you unless you have “Unstable updates” enabled in the F-Droid app settings, but you can expand the “Versions” tab and install them manually. Note that these are marked beta for a reason: proceed at your own risk.

• Nextcloud Talk released 3.2.0beta1 with a completely reworked UI flow, and support for loading remote images. (There was also a regular update to 3.1.3 with some bug fixes.)

Removed apps

• Most of the old simple mobile tools were moved to the archive: Calendar, Contacts, File Manager, Gallery and Notes. They are no longer maintained, and have been replaced by their “Pro” counterparts.

• AddressToGPS was moved to the archive because the network service it relies on stopped working recently, and there hasn’t been activity from the app’s maintainer in over 2 years. For more details, see this issue. As replacement, we suggest Acastus Photon, or although heavy, OsmAnd~ which can look up addresses even when offline.

6 apps were removed.

Tips and Feedback

Do you have important app updates we should write about? Send in your tips via Mastodon! Send them to @fdroidorg@mastodon.technology and remember to tag with #TWIF. Or use the TWIF submission thread on the forum. The deadline to the next TWIF is Thursday 12:00 UTC.

General feedback can also be sent via Mastodon, or, if you’d like to have a live chat, you can find us in #fdroid on Freenode, on Matrix via #fdroid:f-droid.org or on Telegram. All of these spaces are bridged together, so the choice is yours. You can also join us on the forum.