F-Droid

Bookworms in our machines

Posted on Mar 21, 2024 by Licaon_Kter

TWIF generated on Thursday, 21 Mar 2024, Week 12

F-Droid core

Last week’s TWIF was rather short in entertaining app info, but with a reason. Albeit F-Droid is distro agnostic and should work just fine with any, the main infrastructure is developed around Debian given that both projects have aligned goals when it comes to software freedom. Our “F-Droid maintains in Debian” post dives deeper into this.

Latest Debian version is 12, codenamed Bookworm and was launched last year. Current F-Droid infrastructure is still based on the previous version codenamed Bullseye. Last Thursday we’ve started the process to upgrade to Bookworm, in more of the places this needs to happen, be it Gitlab CI, main build server, contributors servers, websites, etc. As the process is done live during/between the running build cycles, things are not yet in sync, hence the main server has built less apps than usual as metadata recipes are adapted to run on the new updated system. For example, previous Bullseye had Java 11 by default and we can install Java 17 as needed, but newer Bookworm has Java 17 by default and older Java 11 needs to be added for all the apps that still depend on it.

This TWIF has 122 updated apps and 8 added, but many apps are still waiting in the queue. So, if your favorite app update is not yet live, we ask for a bit more patience.

Community News

@linsui tries to send an :emoji:

auth was updated to 2.0.41 and ente Photos was updated to 0.8.71. The ente team finally open sourced the server part so you can now touch the opening screen of auth for 7 times and enter your own self-hosted server URL. Photos is not yet ready, but should be coming soon. The apps descriptions are missing, but upstream is aware.

Delta Chat was updated to 1.44.0 bringing more of that polish this chat over e-mail app needs. Developers always have fun interesting blog posts and the latest one covers what’s new more extensively.

Material Files was updated to 1.7.0, but unfortunately it has some bugs, SFTP and SMB are broken currently, and the hot fix version is blocked by the Bookworm upgrade.

PipePipe was updated to 3.3.1 and will finally present the “Update checker” dialogue so users can decide if they want updates directly from the developer or if they want to use the F-Droid built and verified updates.

@Licaon_Kter does not have a tablet:

Quicksy was updated to 2.13.5+free and Conversations was updated to 2.13.5+free and the beta 2.14.0-beta.3+free. They include more fixes as usual, but two things are to be noted. Versions 2.13.x are the last ones that can be installed on Android 5, a system launched almost 10 years ago. If you’re still using it pretty please with sugar on top try to find a custom Android distro like LineageOS and update to the newest version available. If you feel that F-Droid provides apps that are better at security and privacy, there’s not much apps can do to protect you as a user if the underlying base system is vulnerable to 10 years of exploits.

The second note is that, besides needing Android 6 or later, 2.14.0 will introduce call integration, a feature that makes sense on calls enabled devices. In testing, tablet users, that usually lack such an integration, complained of crashes and those were fixed as much as found. So if you are a tablet user you might need to avoid updating to 2.14.0-beta.3+free and wait for the next beta or the final release, whatever comes first.

Tied to the two news items above, did you know that webxdc, “web apps shared in a chat”, a technology promoted by the Delta Chat developers, can now run in XMPP clients like the Conversations forks, Cheogram and monocles chat? More than 100 of them can already be tried out: https://webxdc.org/apps/

Removed Apps

1 apps were removed

The ParkenUlm developers have removed the app source code and asked the team to archive the app.

Newly Added Apps

8 apps were newly added

Updated Apps

115 more apps were updated

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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