F-Droid

FOSS contributors' first step: translation

Posted on Aug 15, 2024 by Licaon_Kter

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 15 Aug 2024, Week 33

Community News

Translations are the easiest way to help your favourite apps, not only that they’ll look nice when you use them in your language, but also this enables more users even if they don’t know the native language of the app developer. (That’s how I started too, remember?)

The best way to translate is when projects have setup a translation portal, F-Droid signals such apps with the “Translation” link on website and in client, but not all apps have this so you might need to ask the developer to setup one first. For reference, top 3 used portals: Weblate (used by F-Droid too, open-source, self-hostable, our recommendation), Crowdin and Transifex (both proprietary but free for FLOSS projects).

Also F-Droid contributor yzqzss has setup their own Weblate at toolate.othing.xyz for apps that won’t fit the main hosted.weblate.org criteria.

Jami was updated to 20240802-01, but is the app translated in your language fully? If not, you can lend a hand, and their recent “How to contribute to translations” post guides you on how to start.

At least two users pinged us about a peculiar habit of them that recent updates broke, running OsmAnd~ from F-Droid and OSMAnd from the upstream developer at the same time. The issue was introduced by the app developers, but F-Droid added a local fix too as needed for our heavily modified build recipe. You can update now to 4.8.5 and everything should work as it used to do. Translation wise, we’ve updated our app description a while ago but most locales were still old so we had to cleaned them up, and they’ll default to the English one now. There’s no translations portal yet, but you can submit your translation via Gitlab or the Forum, based on these 3 texts.

For translations fans, our forum hosts a long thread with user ideas, if you want to dig further.

We’ve got a lot of requests and concerns about Wikipedia being outdated, but the developers worked to fix the issue and the app is updated to current r/2.7.50495-r-2024-07-23.

Removed Apps

12 apps were removed

These were left behind and we already have better alternatives:

  • Andlytics: Track your apps on Play Store
  • aRevelation: Password manager (Manage your password with one of these apps)
  • aRevelation: password manager based on Revelation Password Manager file format
  • CuprumPDF: View PDF files (You’ll find another PDF viewer soon)
  • DroidWall: Firewall frontend (Plenty of firewalls to choose from)
  • Icon Request for Numix: Send icon requests to Numix (Try other icon packs)
  • Mustard: Microblogging via StatusNet (Try AndStatus)
  • Mustard {MOD}: Microblogging client
  • sbautologin: Autologin for Starbucks WLAN
  • Scrobble Droid: Keep track of what you listen to (Some players have scrobble support)
  • Train Schedule: Sri Lanka train schedules
  • 四次元: Sina Weibo client

Newly Added Apps

4 apps were newly added
  • BILIBILIAS: An auxiliary tool for Bilibili video caching, providing one-click caching
  • Code Word: Guess the secret Code Word
  • SocksTun: A simple and lightweight VPN over socks5 proxy (tun2socks)
  • Tilde Friends: A p2p social network client (SSB) and a platform for writing and running web apps

Updated Apps

103 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

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