This Week In F-Droid 21, Week 37, 2018

In this edition: F-Droid project receives a donation of two VMs, Tor Browser coming to Android, 28 new apps including Emerald Dialer and MiniVector, and 61 app updates including NewPipe and Kwik EFIS & DMAP.

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.

Tor Browser moving to officially support Android

The Tor Project has released an alpha of Tor Browser for Android for the first time ever. It’s available on Tor Project’s downloads page and Google Play for now, but the possibilities of bringing it to F-Droid are being explored. This is especially relevant as Orfox (from the builtin but not-enabled-by-default Guardian repository) will be sunsetted.

F-Droid receives a donation of two big VMs

We had two big VMs donated to us by Pretty Easy Privacy. They have been delivered, and @_hc and @uniq have been trying them out. More later.

New apps

We have a whopping 28 new apps for you to try this week!

• 9P: Word puzzle game
• Aalener Optik-Formelrechner: German-only app for doing optical calculations
• BK Doorlock: Binary Kitchen’s Open Sesame
• Character Recognition: Extract text from images
• Custom Search: A Simple Query Search on Google using Dorking
• Emerald Dialer is a lightweight dialer which has T9 search and two themes. This application was made because Dialer2 is a bit outdated.
• Get Off Your Phone: Control procrastination with an app locker
• Knock on Ports: A port knocking client
• LTE Cleaner (FOSS): System cleaner
• Light Android Launcher: Lightweight app launcher
• Mars Live Wallpaper: Rotating red planet
• Featured miniVector: is a minified version of Riot.im, which results in a smaller and lighter app which requires less scary permissions. It achieves this by removing Jitsi conferencing support and some smaller things. Edit: Note that voice and video calls are not supported in this version. Support may be added back in a future version.
• NotificationLog: Log system notifications locally
• PSLab: Pocket Science Lab Android interface for PSLab hardware
• Pausing Healthily: Break reminder with helpful exercises
• PianOli: Baby game to keep your device safe from random baby-taps
• Privacy Helper: An app privacy guide
• Resume Builder: An app to help you create your resume
• Riksdagskollen: Allow users to keep track of the Swedish parliament
• Ril Control: Control the RIL-daemon process
• Sam Remote: Simple WiFi remote for Samsung TVs
• SleepyWifi: Disables the Wi-Fi when the phone is in sleep mode
• SyncTool: Synchronize data between a smartphone and a server
• Tron Wallet: Multifunctional wallet for the TRON network
• WateryDroid: Simple reminder app to drink water
• Web Media Share: Browser for viewing, sharing, or casting media from websites
• Xia Express: Create interactive images by croping zoomable details
• Yoke: Hackable gamepad for Linux

Updated apps

In total, 61 apps were updated this week. Here are the highlights:

• AdGuard Content Blocker is an ad blocker for browsers that support content blocking technology. So far, these are Yandex Browser and Samsung Internet browser. Version 2.2.1 adds a whitelist setting, clean filters cache, new locales, and the order of entries will be respected when importing user filter lists.

• DNS Hero lets you inspect DNS zones like a superhero. Version 1.1.3 is in, adding a brand new preferences screen and different diagnostics cards colors for improved readability. Behind the scenes, some problems with non-free dependencies were addressed, thanks to @Rudloff).

• GPSTest is an app for testing GPS and GNSS capabilities of a device, with real-time information for satellites in view of your device. Version 3.2.0 adds D/M/S support for latitude and longitude, share in multiple location formats, run-time instead of install-time permissions, Greek and Dutch translations, and allows free map movement during location updates.

• @ninelima reports: I am very pleased to announce release 22 of Kwik EFIS (Electronic Flight Information System) and DMAP (Digital Mapping). The product suite now has support for the Stratux devices. This allows for a very inexpensive solution to simple flight instrumentation for use in experimental aircraft. Short article on the Stratux/Kwik integration.

  Some videos:

  • Kwik EFIS / Stratux - Test Flight
  • Kwik EFIS / Stratux - Dual monitor test

• MHGUDB is an extensive, all in one, Monster Hunter Generations reference. It had a major update to 2.0.1, adding Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate data, and many usability improvements.

• Markor 1.1.0 is out. Markor is a powerful text editor for Markdown and todo.txt files. This release adds several new features for working with images, a list of popular files, and a virtual folder for popular & recent files. You can read about even more improvements and bug fixes in the accompanying blog post.

• Mastalab was updated from 1.11.0 to 1.12.2, adding several Mastodon 2.5 features such as managing filters, hiding boosts from a specific account, and featuring other accounts on your profile. It can also now DM from profile, open toots in a browser, has improved layout for profiles with a new “pinned” tab, and more.

• Mi Manga Nu lets you read and organize mangas. This update from 1.86 to 1.89 now comes as a dedicated F-Droid build flavor, adding new mangas and various fixes.

• NewPipe had two updates during this period. First off, 0.14.0 was released featuring a more customizable main page and different UI and UX tweaks including a reworked navigation drawer, drag and drop to close the popup / pip mode and much more. For more info you can check the blog post.

  On the heels of that comes the 0.14.1 hotfix, which fixes NewPipe after a change on YouTube’s side basically broke everything. Also includes a fix for long links in video descriptions.

• We now have OsmAnd~ 3.2 beta in the repo which is supposed to fix Android 8 rendering performance issues, and fixes a crash on startup that occurred with non-latin maps. This update won’t be automatically suggested to you unless you have “Unstable updates” enabled in the F-Droid app, but you can expand the “Versions” tab and install it manually. Note that this is a beta version: proceed at your own risk.

• QKSMS, a material design replacement for the stock AOSP messaging app, was updated from 3.4.5 to 3.5.3, with initial SMS backup and restore, direct share support, smoother scrolling for MMS messages, and many bug fixes.

• Tusky is a lightweight material design Mastodon client. Version 3.1 fixes image orientation when uploading them, fixes bugs with loading bottom items, allows account switching while offline, and other bug fixes and improvements.

Tips and Feedback

Do you have important app updates we should write about? Send in your tips via Mastodon! Send them to @fdroidorg@floss.social 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 #freenode_#fdroid:matrix.org or on Telegram. All of these spaces are bridged together, so the choice is yours. You can also join us on the forum.