F-Droid

Let us compete on trustworthiness and an Arcticons special release

Posted on 2023-11-09 by paulali

TWIF generated on Thursday, 09 Nov 2023, Weeks 45 & 44

F-Droid core

Let us compete on trustworthiness

This Thursday, 10 jurors were selected in San Francisco. Their verdict - which is expected around mid-December - could change the way Google controls apps and their distribution. This is a result of the suit filed by Epic Games against Google in 2020 over the monopoly held by the Google Play Android app store and its abuse in stifling the competition.

This is something that resonates with F-Droid and the wider FLOSS community. Despite Google’s claims of choice on Android and Google Play, Google still ensures that using all alternatives to Google Play is a second-class experience. It allegedly restricts device makers and wireless carriers that want to sell phones and tablets with the official version of its Android operating system from promoting app stores beside Play. It has also barred developers from offering competing app stores through Play by paying over $1 billion to top developers such as Activision Blizzard and Riot Games in order to keep them loyal to Play through a program it codenamed Project Hug, Epic alleges. Recently, Google Play Services automatically uninstalled the KDE Connect App distributed via F-Droid without any in depth explanation.

To learn more about this, please read this article. F-Droid’s very own eighthave was interviewed to explain the severity of the situation.

Contributor highlights

@linsui highlighted the following:

KOReader is updated to v2023.10 with the fix for the libwebp CVE. Please update it ASAP.

Community News

Special anniversary release of Arcticons

Donno shared with us the information below

On Nov 8 I’ve released a special Anniversary edition of Arcticons! Three years ago, I released the first version with around 900~ icons, now we have 8000+

After contributing for months to Frost, a fill-based icon pack. I wanted to create something different (but with the same goal), a line-based icon pack. Because I lacked the technical skills to create an app, so gladly I came across Frost, which was a perfect app to use as a base for Arcticons.

In these three years, the project gained many contributors, and thanks to its low entry level. We’ve managed to do quite a lot in that time, like: Upgrading our app to have more features like icon request support, a variant with black lines and later one with Material You colors , we’ve also created 7000+ icons together, and we’re expanding to Linux too!

This is all possible thanks to the open-source nature of the project, and it’s fantastic community

The official release can be found here and will come to F-Droid in a couple of days. Thanks to Donno for making this happen.

Removed Apps

4 apps were removed

ClashMetaForAndroid and the fork Catbox were removed because the development ceased recently. More on this can be found here

WallmeWallpaper:Wallpaper app and lemmur were removed because they stopped working and their development ceased.

Newly Added Apps

17 apps were newly added

Updated Apps

212 apps were updated

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