F-Droid News

This Week In F-Droid 48, Week 12, 2019

In this edition: The guardianproject.info website migration effort is underway, and odds-and-ends. There are 6 new and 82 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.

Guardian Project Hugo Migration

Coffee and @_hc have been working to migrate the guardianproject.info website to Hugo. The site has been set up, and much of the content has been migrated, but work remains to get all the details right and port over the navigation.

Google Play Issues

@vanitasvitae points to a story about KDE Connect being briefly removed from the Google Play Store, ostensibly for violating Google’s new policy on apps that utilize SMS permissions, despite an exemption that clearly applied to KDE Connect. It was restored two days later.

@Poussinou highlighted some troubles for the MusicPiped app, which allows users to stream audio from Youtube. It was published to Google Play, however its primary function violates Google’s Terms of Service. Google have responded by denying update submissions from the developer, though updates continue to be available via F-Droid.

Odds and ends

• @vanitasvitae has let us know about part 2 of a series on lineageos (German): LineageOS – Take back control.
• @_hc is looking for developers interested in helping to support white labeling in F-Droid.
• @_hc and @uniq continue to work on NetCipher in order to improve Tor support, and force the use TLSv1.2 or greater.

New apps

• OpenPods: Check the battery status of your airpods.
• Vector Camera: An app that applies real-time effects to the camera input.
• DOI to SciHub: Quickly download research.
• p!n: Pin notes to the notification area.
• MoLe: Convenient front-end to hledger-web
• FiSSH: SSH authentication via fingerprint scanning over network (TLS sockets).

Updated apps

In total, 82 apps were updated this week. Here are the highlights:

• Delta Chat was updated from 0.101.1 to 0.200.0, improving setup for many providers (including OAuth 2.0 support for Google and Yandex), and enabling sharing into the app.
• EteSync was updated from 1.2.6 to 1.3.0, improving performance for large initial syncs.
• Suntimes was updated from 0.10.3 to 0.11.0, adding an alarm and a clock widget.
• Bop-MusicPlayer was updated from 1.1.2 to 1.2, making microphone use optional, and enabling control via Google Assistant.
• WebApps was updated from v2.18 to v2.20, allowing for custom user agents, and favicon-action bar color matching.
• Periodical was updated from 1.23 to 1.30, separating events and symptoms into different lists, and indicating each per-day.
• Bitcoin Wallet was updated from 6.41 to 7.02, providing support for receiving to and sending from SegWit (Bech32) addresses.
• FairEmail was updated from 1.381 to 1.395, adding local contacts view with search, full HTML signatures, export/import of contacts notification settings, and optionally shows accounts on startup screen.
• KISS launcher was updated from 3.7.6 to 3.7.9, improving startup performance and memory consumption.
• SkyTube was updated from 2.94 to 2.95, fixing video playback.
• Slide was updated from 6.0.1-3 to 6.1, adding mod toolbox support, a text editor overhaul, and improvements to wiki link handling.
• FreedomBox was updated from 0.4 to 0.5, adding SDK v28 support.
• GitNex was updated from 1.0-rc6 to 1.0.1, bringing some small fixes to an otherwise feature-packed 1.0 release (congratulations GitNex!).
• Manyverse was updated from 0.1903.13-beta to 0.1903.19-beta, with several new features including post preview.
• UserLAnd was updated from 2.3.8 to 2.4.0, adding file-system import and export.
• FiSSH has been unarchived at version 3.0.

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.

• Telegram was updated from 5.3.1 to 5.4.0, introducing auto-playing videos.

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.