F-Droid

Dude, Where's My Archive?

Posted on May 02, 2024 by Licaon_Kter

TWIF generated on Thursday, 02 May 2024, Week 18

F-Droid core

Four weeks ago in the 14-th TWIF we announced the start of 1.20 testing and the repository management improvements that it brings. Over the years, the concept of a “repository archive” kinda stayed the same. Basically, instead of serving the users the full list of all the versions of all the apps, we give them only the latest three versions for each app, as users will just update to the latest one anyway. This keeps an index update easy to download, and this was improved again a couple of years ago by offering diff-updates (not the full index, just the difference compared to your local index), so if you update once a week you’ll end up downloading 200Kb or less.

Since the Archive will collect old versions continuously, its size grows each cycle, and the index as expected, making working with it a heavy task for your device. For this reason we don’t encourage its use unless it’s really needed, eg. for running on old Android versions, and to disable it when done.

As the Client focus is to draw users to the actual main repo, and not to emphasis the Archive, with the latest repository management design it was decided to treat Archive as an option that users can toggle on, instead of having a separate repo entry. This toggle is in the repo details, “in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’“, 🙂 oh, I mean under the mirror list. This list is under a work in progress redesign of its own, so it’s a bit finicky to scroll right now, leaving even astute Android users to wonder how an Archive can be added or used.

To be fair, the linked Fedi post above has this information in the first picture, but we understand that we’ve looked a lot at these strings and we are biased to consider them “good enough”. One reason to test these changes as early as possible is to gather feedback from users. If you have thoughts on a better wording, feel free to ping us.

Community News

Aurora Store was updated to 4.4.4 and will deemed stable in the next-next index update. You can update now manually if you wish.

Grazer Linuxtage Schedule has changed its application identifier due to some, ahem, alternative centralized store policy. Its users are advised to uninstall and install the new app aptly named: Grazer Linuxtage

NewPipe is reproducible again and was updated to 0.27.0 fixing a lot of bugs users were waiting for months already. We hope future versions get delivered faster.

Updated Apps

72 more apps were updated

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