This Week In F-Droid 34, Week 50, 2018

In this edition: Planet F-Droid now exists, call for submissions for Planet F-Droid and first article of Izzy’s F-Droid series available in English. There are 3 new and 59 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.

Planet F-Droid now exists

F-Droid now has its own planet, thanks to the hard work of @vanitasvitae, who single-handedly set it all up! A so-called “planet” site aggregates the blogs of community members (see http://planet.fsfe.org or https://planet.jabber.org as examples). And if you’ve been secretly following along via the forum, Planet F-Droid now also has the blog of Gregor Santner, of Markor, MemeTastic and dandelion* fame.

Call for submissions for Planet F-Droid

Hello FOSS Android enthusiasts and project leads! Do you want your FOSS and Android related blog to be included in Planet F-Droid? Please have a look at the Planet’s inclusion rules, or read more about it.

First article of Izzy’s F-Droid series available in English

@Izzy writes:

I’ve just put the first article of my F-Droid series online. “F-Droid: The privacy-friendly alternative to Google Play Store” can be found at https://android.izzysoft.de/articles/named/fdroid-intro-1.

The German article is also online now at the same location.

New apps

• DeltaCamera: Record movement (deltas) in one single image.
• AnLinux: Run Linux on Android without root access with the help of Termux and RoMote. Several distros and WM/DE combinations are available.
• /d/gapps: Delete/disable gapps.
• PeerTube PeerTube is a federated (ActivityPub) video streaming platform using P2P (WebTorrent) directly in the web browser.
• DecSync CC & spaRSS DecSync These apps use the DecSync-libs to synchronize key-value mappings without a server. They cover the Contacts/Calendars and the RSS use cases. To start synchronizing, all you have to do is synchronize the directory “DecSync” located in the primary external storage, using for example Syncthing.
• NoSurf for reddit Calls itself “the world’s first non-addictive Reddit client”, and offers ways to limit time wasting on reddit.

Updated apps

In total, 59 apps were updated this week. Here are the highlights:

• Music Player GO was updated from 3.5.0.2 to 3.5.2.1 with code cleaning and simplifications, new scroller with touching the edge of the screen, minor changes to UI and layout, a new Turkish translation, smaller APK, and assorted bugfixes.

• Featured Mastalab was updated from 1.36.0 to 1.39.0 and now has an art timeline! The buttons for boosting or favoriting are now animated, “create toot” button is hidden while scrolling, there is support for scheduling boosts (toots could already be scheduled), and many bugs were fixed. Oh, and it should now have textual descriptions for everything, for visually impaired users.

• Featured Markor comes with lots of changes in 1.5.0. I could write a summary, but you should really just check the release blog post which explains everything in pictures! (And also in words.)

• Open Contacts was updated from 7.0 to 9.0, featuring a dark theme, support for phone numbers with symbols, delete all contacts, several UI and UX improvements and bugfixes, including an important fix for a crash in Android 8 (Oreo). Please export and reimport all your contacts in order for search to work. Apologies, but it’s only a one-time thing.

• AndStatus updated to 45.01, adding the “unread notifications” timeline. It also has improved handling of HTML content.

• SimpleEmail 1.3.0 brings a better layout for the message list, refresh message list, and moves the color picker account outside of advanced.

• Since we’ve mentioned SimpleEmail, its upstream app FairEmail got plenty of updates and fixes in the mean time, way too many to list here. What we can mention is that the app has lowered its device requirements so now it’s compatible with Android 5 too.

• And still talking about e-mail, InboxPager got a big update to 4.0 bringing an UI update and an internal file manager.

• Conversations & Quicksy Since TWIF 26, version 2.3.4+fcr, the apps were updated continuously up to the current 2.3.9+fcr, fixing bugs and adding small improvements:
  • Fixed group chat mentions when nick ends in a dot, asking for permissions after direct share, CVE-2018-18467, re-sending failed files in group chats and misc bug fixes for Android 9.
  • Improved handling of bookmark nicks, long press on ‘allow’ or ‘add back’ snackbar to bring up ‘reject’, made PEP avatars public to play nice with the newly released Prosody 0.11, OMEMO stability improvements.
  • Added context menu options for long pressing avatar in 1:1 chat and send PM menu entry in anonymous MUCs.

• IceCatMobile The free software rebranding of the latest Firefox-ESR release just got updated to version 60, besides the usual plethora of new features it also moves the UI to Photon, and so it drops support for Android 4.0.4 and older. Users of the Sync feature should keep an eye on this bug report if it suddenly doesn’t work.

• Hacker’s Keyboard After almost 2 years of missing updates the keyboard was now updated, no ground-breaking features, but mostly fixes and compatibility updates for the new Android versions.

Removed apps

• Iven News Reader was moved to the archive because the app has been marked as “deprecated” by its author.

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 #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.