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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 05 Sep 2024, Week 36

F-Droid Core

The F-Droid Client version served by the huge blue button of the main homepage of the F-Droid website was just updated from 1.17 to the latest stable 1.20. As week 14 TWIF forebode, and the week 30 TWIF explained, newer Client versions introduced the “Other” anti-feature setting as an umbrella to cover whatever the future would bring. Unfortunately, updating the client would just add the new setting turned off by default, so apps flagged with such an anti-feature, eg. TetheredNet would not be shown in searches. A small banner on top of the results list mentions the hidden apps, but users might easily miss it. If your client was upgraded from an older version this year, you can just open the Settings page, find “Include anti-feature apps” entry and check “Other Anti-features”. But from now on, when you install F-Droid for the first time, from the blue button, this setting is already as it should be. More work is ongoing to polish the small banner, fix settings on client upgrades and integrate “TetheredNet” as a standalone anti-feature.

Community News

Hacktoberfest 2024, A month-long celebration of all things open-source, will be upon us soon. Former F-Droid contributors have setup a site to keep track of Android apps, around the community, that will join in. If you want to lend a hand to your favorite app, do bookmark the Droidtoberfest website and remember to get ready to contribute.

BobBall was updated to 1.17 after an 8 year hiatus. For Android 2.3.3 users there’s only bad news, no, it’s not about your Android being 13 years too old, it’s worse, the new BobBall works only on 4.0 and later. 😅

LibreTube was updated to 0.25.1 and now supports “local streams extraction” similar to NewPipe, as it contains a workaround for recent AntiBot protection changes by YouTube. The upstream issue contains more user experiences and info.

RHVoice - a free and open source speech synthesize was updated to 1.16.3 after 8 months of no updates as F-Droid contributors need to manually track when releases are ready. Updates are pretty important as the other well known TTS app, eSpeak, is already 2 years old and can’t even be installed on newer arm64-only or Android 14+ devices. RHVoice does not cover the same range of locales but provides some voice output to use.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed

LibreOffice 2022 Schedule and PyConZA 2021, program apps for older conferences

Newly Added Apps

5 apps were newly added
  • Citrine: Nostr relay for Android
  • Code Rain Wallpaper: A live wallpaper inspired by the matrix falling code effect
  • Image Meta Cleaner: a cross-platform application designed to Show and Remove metadata from images
  • Ion Launcher: A beautiful, functional and customizable launcher
  • Mensinator: Tailored Period Tracking, Total Privacy—Your Period, Your Control

Updated Apps

94 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

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