F-Droid

New year, new gallery app and NewPipe news

Posted on Jan 04, 2024 by paulali

TWIF generated on Thursday, 04 Jan 2024, Week 1

Community News

@Licaon_Kter brings news from suite lands:

As last year’s TWIF49 covered, the beloved Simple Mobile Tools suite of apps has an unclear future, FOSS-wise at least. This week we have two pieces of news about that.

The bad news, it was discovered (thanks to our long time contributor @Izzy) that Simple Gallery Pro contained a library that while itself being FOSS depends on some Google proprietary ones, so all affected versions, basically all, were removed.

When a piece of FOSS software has issues in development, or certain people think as much, the one solution universally praised is “forking”, meaning it will find a new home, name and people that care to carry it further. There’s a whole discussion about where exactly those people willing to help were for Simple Mobile Tools before the actual sale, but we won’t have it here now. What we can say is that at least @naveensingh and others have rallied under the Fossify organization and try to continue the Simple apps legacy.

Hence the good news, Fossify Gallery is their first app to be included in F-Droid. Yes, it’s build reproducible, yes it’s not orange but more green, and yes it will miss the Panoramic view that depends on Google proprietary libs, but it’s fully FOSS. More to come soon…

SimpleX Chat was updated to 5.4.2 but only the armv7 flavour. arm64 should come in the next cycle.

@linsui tells us that:

Both Arcticons and Arcticons Black were updated to 8.3.1 and are now build reproducible, meaning that if you had them installed please uninstall and reinstall the new versions so you get future updates too.

Screenshot sharer was removed only to be replaced with the newly included and reproducible QuickShot: Share Screenshot, hence do lookup the new app and uninstall the old one.

Tux Paint was updated to 0.9.31, while being an app for children it might “scare” their parents as in this update “stamps are now integrated into the app, raising the app size to almost 250Mb”. So be sure to update on Wi-Fi instead.

NewPipe’s very own Tobias Groza dropped by to inform us that:

NewPipe published two new versions 0.26.0 and 0.26.1 adding support for more content from channels (playlists, shorts, about, …) and higher image quality in the last two weeks.

We have also written a blog post summarizing the important things from 2023 (e.g. implemented features, the newly founded NewPipe e.V., temporary removal of our homepage from Google search) and taking a look at the plans for 2024 (adding support for better search filters and starting the modernization of the app).

We also announce some maintainer changes: I will leave the project due to not having much spare time, Stypox and AudricV are taking more responsibilities, and the project is looking for new additional maintainers to fill the gap and be able to implement the plans for 2024.

NOTE: These NewPipe updates are delayed in F-Droid currently and the team is investigating why.

Newly Added Apps

2 more apps were newly added
  • Cuscon - An icon pack with varied shapes.
  • Onyx - Your new app to guide you around La Doua Campus.

Updated Apps

138 more apps were updated

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