F-Droid

Maintaining ownership

Posted on Apr 18, 2024 by paulali

TWIF generated on Thursday, 18 Apr 2024, Week 16

F-Droid core

Update 1.20.0-alpha1 added “tighter integration with the unattended updates code for Android 14 and later” as last week’s TWIF said, and we’ve covered a bit about this in TWIF24 week 6 when we said: “Each app has a new property about which app installed it last creating a bond between them. This property is set on install or on the next manual update”. Why is this important? Well, the EU Digital Markets Act asked Google (and not only 😉) to treat user installed application stores as a first class citizen, to give them the same importance as their own centralized proprietary store. In the past, users complained in our forum and elsewhere on the Internet, that Google Play tries (and most often fails) to update apps installed by F-Droid Client.

We start to see the changes, needed for the above legislation, in action already, as Play started to acknowledge where an app was installed from and to not force updates against the user’s will. Our own client developer, @grote, posted a screenshot here ✅.

As usual with software development, always test with the latest versions available, and Google uses this as a defense, this means latest Android, Play version and of course latest F-Droid Client version 1.20.0-alpha1.

Feedback is welcomed!

Community News

@linsui tunnels for a fix:

Tailscale is going through an app redesign that will be released soon. During this development two new versions were pushed to F-Droid, 1.61.105 and 1.64.0, those were not yet ready and were just crashing at start. Today, a fixed version was released, 1.60.1-t2caffeeb4-g6f7ae79a31c, and users are asked to update.

@Licaon_Kter craves for Material Me:

Conversations and Quicksy were updated to 2.15.0+free marking not only a 10 year anniversary of the app but also bringing an updated redesign of the UI. Started as an “what if?” experiment of an XMPP client that ‘cloned’ the current (at the time) Google Hangouts app, the old design language of the UI was a pain point for many new users. The new design lets all that go and embraces the current Material You language that leaves old users longing for the old familiar green 😢 and baffles new users that can’t just make the palette look like they want 😂. All Android versions get a new default theme, but on Android 12 or later users can enable the new in-app Dynamic color mode and use their Android system Settings to change colors. Theme feedback was massive so expect little tweaks and fixes as new versions are released too.

While the new design is nice (screenshots will be updated for the next version), most users care about the actual app functionality. Regarding the calling integration that 2.14.0 brought, users of Realme or OnePlus devices with stock ROM are asked to test both in and out calls, and provide feedback if they’re not working. And coming back to TWIF24 week 14, users on Android 7 or older that install Quicksy today might not be able to register an account pertaining to the Let’s Encrypt certificate expiration issue. The same advice applies, install the Let’s Encrypt ISRG Root X1 certificate so this is fixed system wide, but the developer is aware and a fix will be pushed in a new version soon.

Newly Added Apps

10 apps were newly added

Updated Apps

160 more apps were updated

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