F-Droid News

This Week In F-Droid 41, Week 5, 2019

In this edition: Stringlate discontinued, part 2 of Izzy’s F-Droid series is now online in German and androDNS: Third reproducible app in F-Droid. There are 16 new and 107 updated apps.

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.

Stringlate discontinued

The developer of Stringlate has stopped all work on the project (more information here). It’s really a shame, since it is used to translate other FLOSS Android apps (available on F-Droid). The project is looking for a new maintainer and could use help from the community.

H/T @Poussinou

Part 2 of Izzy’s F-Droid series is now online in German

See: F-Droid for advanced users and developers. This article has earlier been released in English (on-line) and in print in c’t magazine. In agreement with c’t magazine, the German articles will be posted with a delay. As such, part 3 will be out in a few weeks, after the print version has been published.

New apps

• Featured AndroDNS: We have the third reproducible app in F-Droid! This DNS client allows you to perform customized DNS queries directly from your mobile phone.
• eBooks: Parse and find e-books to download.
• MuPDF mini: Minimalist viewer for pdf, xps, cbz, unprotected epub, and fb2 documents.
• Go to Sleep: Reminds you to go to sleep… until you do.
• Trigger: Open a door over wifi or the internet.
• Bop-MusicPlayer: A lightweight powerful music player.
• ScraperClub: Application for scraperclub.
• AppOpsX: A front-end for the appopsservice.
• piggybudget: Easily track your expenses.
• GameDealz: A non-official client for isthereanydeal.com.
• Free Klondike: A mixture of freecell and klondike solitaire.
• TimeLimit
• Diab: A smart diabetes manager app.
• CPU Stats: Show cpu usage within the statusbar.
• Trekarta: Simple, responsive map for your trek.
• SDB Viewer: View song lyrics, a translation of it and guitar chords.

Updated apps

In total, 107 apps were updated this week. Here are the highlights:

• KeePassDroid was updated from 2.3.4 to 2.4.1, with a new fingerprint setting and better handling for large attachments.

• Delta Chat was updated from 0.20.0 to 0.100.0 with a complete rework of the UI using pure material design, and too many improvements to list! Check out the changelog.

• Major EteSync saw a huge update from 0.22.6 to 1.0.1, adding support for changing the encryption password, Tasks support via OpenTasks, stock password entry, fixes for email invitations, support for the new associate account type, and more.

• openScale is a weight and body metrics tracker, with support for Bluetooth scales. In this update from 1.8.4 to 1.9.1, you’ll find a custom Bluetooth stack to improve Bluetooth communication, new calculations and measurements, support for the Libra-W scale, and the usual smaller updates and bug fixes.

• μMath+ was updated from 2.17.4 to 2.18.0, now with support for Android 9, assigning array elements by index, and displaying whole array without using indices.

• Vinyl Music Player updated from 0.18.0 to 0.19.2, adding a new smart playlist “not played lately”, smart playlist decoration, and finish current song when the sleep timer runs out.

• SysLog 2.2.0 is out with instructions for rootless operation, updated dependencies and crash fixes in landscape mode.

• Yaacc was updated to 2.2.0, with content browsing now done in chunks, async and non blocking for the UI thread. Visualization was added when loading content, Yaacc UPnP Server now respects chunk load requests, and there is a load of bug fixes.

• wallabag is a self-hosted read-it-later app. It updated to 2.1.0 with a new fullscreen article view, Share and Copy options for the link menu, scrolling via hardware keys, TTS auto-switch to article’s language, and a setting to keep screen on while reading.

• Featured Huge changes for Mastalab again in this update from 1.65.1 to 1.70.0. Mastalab now supports Pleroma, including moderator functions! In further news, you can now compose messages in either plain text, markdown or html. Support for scheduling toots on the server was added and there is now a setting to display new toots either above or below the “fetch more” button. Tag timelines can be switched into art timelines, GIFs are autostarted and looped, there are a bunch of Peertube improvements, and much more.

• Revolution IRC is a modern Android IRC client. It released version 0.5.0, with advanced theming features, SASL External (CertFP) support, new message indicator and banner, date markers, start on boot option, and per-channel send history.

• Open Camera was updated from 1.44.1 to 1.45.2, now with a ‘low light’ noise reduction photo mode, continuous burst mode, support for writing WebP and PNG images, and H264, HEVC, 3GPP and WebM (no audio) videos. There is a new option to export (and re-import) all settings to a file, new layouts and on-screen icons, time-lapse rates of 120x and 240x, and many other updates and bug fixes.

• Open Contacts updated from 9.0 to 11.0 with UI improvements and making the WhatsApp integration optional. It now supports importing VCard data as-is and there are many improvements to the contact details, such as showing phone number types in contact details. It is also possible to switch time format between ¹²⁄₂₄ hours.

• Major Trireme for Deluge is a thin client for the Deluge torrent software, and was updated from 0.9.1 to 1.0.2, adding support for the new Deluge 2.0 RPC protocol. In addition to that there are some lesser UI tweaks and bug fixes.

• The NewPipe that was broken has been reforged! This update to 0.15.1 should fix the breakage caused by Google’s changes. In addition to that, downloaded files can now be opened with one click, the minimum Android version was bumped to 4.4, streams can be removed by swiping right, and postprocessing for downloads has been added.

• Telegram was updated from 4.9.1 to 5.2.1 adding global permissions for groups, unified group settings, 5-second undo for deleting chats and clearing chat history, new sorting options in Contacts, and new animations when uploading and downloading media.

Removed apps

• MinTube was moved to the archive because it fails to play any videos, and looks abandoned. See https://github.com/imshyam/mintube/issues/39.

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.