F-Droid

More repro apps, featuring Threema, and more monopolies

Posted on 2023-12-14 by paulali

TWIF generated on Thursday, 14 Dec 2023, Week 50

F-Droid core

F-Droid and Basic were updated to 1.19.0-alpha3:

  • IPFS Gateway settings are now in the Proxy section and no longer in Expert Mode
  • Expert Mode Category header now shows which preferences belong to Expert Mode
  • Unify full and basic preferences.xml files

Back in November our week 45 TWIF was relating the news about the 3 years long ongoing ‘Epic v. Google’ trial in the US. This week the jury found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly.

You can read the TL;DR here and the long list of interesting facts that surfaced during the trial, eg. at least points 6, 7 and 11 are related to F-Droid

Community News

@dbrgn from Threema announces that the Threema app, an end-to-end encrypted messenger, which has been open source for a few years, is now included in the official F-Droid repository as “Threema Libre”!

Previously the messenger was already installable through a custom repository, but many users asked whether it could be included in the official repo as well. Thanks to the work done by @linsui, @obfusk, @Mynacol and others, our reproducible build could be successfully verified! Thus, builds from our custom repository can be published in identical form through the F-Droid repository. This means that users can use our repository if they want faster updates, or simply use the official F-Droid sources without having to set up any custom repo.

Thanks to Threema Push (a persistent network connection in a background service), the app already supported instant notifications on new messages without having to rely on Firebase / Google Push. With update 5.2, Threema Libre now also supports waking up Threema Web sessions, the last piece that was missing for Threema Libre to have feature-parity with the “regular” version from Google Play.

The integration into the F-Droid repo / index is not maintained by us, but we are happy to assist if any questions arise! Feel free to ping me.

@linsui informs us that:

Xmp Mod Player 4.12.0 was rebuilt in order to fix it. It was published (or committed) in 2018 and there was no more development since then. I updated it in 2021 but I made a mistake and the app didn’t really work since libxmp was not built at all. Recently I got a report about that and fixed the build with some patches so that it can be built with JDK 11 and NDK r26. It’s a music player for modules, an older sound format. You can find some modules on The Mod Archive. (Note: while the package has been updated, the date of it will still be shown as 2021)

In hiatus news, Orion Viewer - Pdf & Djvu was updated to 0.82.5 and Transdroid was updated to 2.5.23, both back after a two and a half years pause.

@Licaon_Kter muses over:

Minetest was updated to 5.8.0, bringing a long list of new features and fixes, but also an important change: “Minetest Game is no longer the default game and will no longer be shipped by Minetest. If you want it back, install it by using the “Content” tab”

Syncthing-Fork users complained about the app not starting so there’s a tentative fix in latest update 1.27.0.1. (and if that does not magically fix it do try ‘this one wierd trick’: enable Airplane mode, start app, check if it runs ok, then disable Airplane mode)

Removed Apps

1 apps were removed

Uploadgram got archived as its proxy server is no longer online.

Newly Added Apps

6 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

109 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF :) Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread if you have any news from around the community, maybe it will be featured next week ;)

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