F-Droid

Apps availability still high

Posted on Feb 15, 2024 by paulali

TWIF generated on Thursday, 15 Feb 2024, Week 7

Community News

@theimpulson starts the tests:

Aurora Store was updated to 4.4.1 and brings a plethora of improvements. It will be marked as suggested after a while to squash reported bugs in between. Among all the changes major ones are:

  • Support for automatically updating apps (needs a supported installer/android version to auto-install the update)
  • Automatic SHA256 & SHA1 verification for downloaded files
  • Support for updates with signing key rotation (introduced after Android 9.0+)
  • Better support for apps with shared libraries such as Chrome/Chromium and WebView
  • New automatic certificate verification for updates (resolves this issue) (future update of Aurora Store will allow turning this off for interested users)
  • Native Installer and Aurora Services have been deprecated (will be removed completely soon, users are advised to use Session Installer or any other supported one)
  • Exporting installed apps doesn’t require storage permissions anymore

@Licaon_Kter rants about XMPP clients:

Conversations is available in F-Droid, and has been uninterruptedly since May 2014. For instance it was just updated to version 2.13.1+free bringing support for P2P file transfers via WebRTC data channels (yes, the same magic used for calls, not the old proxy65 stuff), fixed interoperability issues with Bind 2.0 on ejabberd and bundled Let’s Encrypt root certificates for Android <= 7. Then again, for a day or so, those who wanted to get or update Conversations from “alternative centralized stores”, say via the new Aurora Store mentioned above or directly from Google Play, were not able to do so, as the app was gone, forcing the app developer to remove yet another feature from the app (the second or third one by now, we lost count) as to appease the faceless procedures.

In TWIF23 Week 50 we presented the results of the ‘Epic v. Google’ trial in the US, and we hope that with each Google move you get a hint to nudge your favourite FOSS developers to have their apps included in a decentralized store-like catalogue too, one that is not under an alphabet named corporation’s control. We understand that many devs like to publish on Play and get a stream of revenue that allows the app development to continue, while F-Droid (client, website) do not have a way to sell apps, they do have donation links, so you can contribute with a thank you, money for a coffee or one month of SMS to help your star app author.

In lock-step, Quicksy was updated to 2.13.1+free too, luckily this app was not removed from Google Play, although it did miss all updates since October 2023.

(NOTE: P2P file transfers via WebRTC data channels work only between apps updated to version 2.13.1. Next version is in the pipeline and will fix compatibility between multiple versions)

Spring Cleaning

Drupal Editor was archived as it was compatible with old unsupported Drupal 5 only.

Rocket.Chat’s removal was announced last week.

Newly Added Apps

7 apps were newly added
  • Broker 1961 - Very attractive board game which was created in 1961 for trading shares
  • Chooser - Finger picker app (so you know who’s first)
  • DailyLog - A quick-logging notes app with customizable shortcut buttons
  • Oblique Strategies - Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas
  • Oshi Uploader - Upload to any Oshi instance
  • Play Deals - Find the latest app deals and discounts on paid apps and games in Google Play store
  • WG Auto Connect - Auto connect to a WireGuard tunnel (the official Wireguard app is needed)

Updated Apps

174 more apps were updated

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