Upgrade your email client, maybe

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 07 Nov 2024, Week 45

Community News

Fennec F-Droid and Mull were updated to 132.0.0, after a two months hiatus where everyone was holding their breath, while we didn’t have time to catch our breath. Lost dependencies, home movements, angry forum posts, rebuilt dependencies, angry toots, added NDKs, stopped cycles (twice!), changed built dependencies, explainer toots, timeouts, closed forum threads, it was a non-stop roller coaster, yet compressed in a slit of time and only for two apps.

In other news, Fennec has Translations activated by default. This enables users to read any (supported) language text without leaving the current page.

While we didn’t expect any drama, Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox, A 100% open source, privacy focused email app, (yes the one of Desktop fame!), and its companion Thunderbird Beta for Testers were newly included. They are based on K-9 Mail, also updated to 8.0, but with some cosmetic and branding differences. A little bit of backstory, back in 2022 it was announced that K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family, so it was just a matter of time for it to become the new app.

And the time has come, the app is ready, albeit most K-9 users got notified about this launch because of a Mozilla source code repo mistake, as the metadata (icon, pics, text) of K-9 were mixed up with Thunderbird and F-Droid said it will update Thunderbird Beta for Testers instead of K-9. Fediverse and our Forum users got up in arms at this bit of info, only visible in F-Droid, that felt like an app takeover, and unfortunately many jumped to conclusions and uninstalled K-9 instead of looking in their launchers to see that there’s no new app and K-9 is still fine. All is well now, and many took this opportunity to switch to Thunderbird following the import steps.

What about K-9’s future? Well, Mozilla says they “plan to continue maintaining and releasing K-9 Mail for approximately one year after the release of Thunderbird for Android”.

Ghost Commander was updated to 1.64.1b1 and we took the opportunity to note that on newer Android versions SFTP connections that use Kerberos authentication might not work as a dependency is missing.

Removed Apps

3 apps were removed
  • MTA Fare Buster: Calculate NYC MTA metrocard prices
  • Offline Puzzle Solver: Solves various kinds of puzzle (Sudoku, N-Queens)
  • pretixdroid: Validates tickets generated by pretix (Superseded by pretixSCAN which was also updated to 2.10.0)

Newly Added Apps

8 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

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

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.