Dealing with the heat

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 31 Oct 2024, Week 44

F-Droid core

F-Droid and F-Droid Basic were updated to 1.20.1 as suggested and to 1.21.1 still in testing.

Some updates on last weeks fires:

  • Nextcloud was updated to 3.30.3 and Nextcloud Dev was updated to 20241026, as some users still reported issues, was this fire extinguished for you?
  • Codeberg polished their filters and F-Droid server could finally build apps hosted there again.
  • Fennec F-Droid and Mull made waves in the Fediverse and beyond as they were marked as vulnerable. We answered most of the questions, it was just a bad timing between new releases fixing critical bugs, tooling issues preventing F-Droid to build these apps and our main contributors being caught up in Real Life. Mozilla source code is just the starting point, and F-Droid must clean it up and build it from open-source code with trusted build tools, and this takes time before it even reaches the build server.
  • We will reword the banner message in the Client to make it sound less scary and use the existing Anti-Features app details field to give as much info as possible.
  • Regarding the new update 132, while everything was in place for a build, and an issue caught early at the start of this cycle was promptly fixed, we are still seeing it fail later on and we are investigating. So this update will be delayed for another cycle.

While all these fires were raging on, we also overhauled our workflow for checkupdates (the bot that pulls in all the autoupdated apps versions) touching upon fdroidserver, fdroiddata and many Gitlab configurations. These changes might not be visible from a user perspective, but they should yield some improvements in helping contributors manage the metadata repository, and catching app issues early on, before they reach the build server.

Community News

Micro REPL, MicroPython IDE, is back with a new developer key, do the uninstall and reinstall dance so you can get future updates too!

The Fossify Suite just got two new entries this week:

  • Fossify Calculator, Simple and open-source calculator for quick and easy calculations
  • Fossify Camera, Lightweight open-source camera app for quick, easy, and secure photography

And some updates:

Are these all? Not quite, we are still waiting for Draw and Flashlight.

Syncthing-Fork was updated to 1.28.0.0, and if you’ve read last week’s Community News section maybe you want to take a look and plan a transfer.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed
  • AndroidIDE: AndroidIDE is an IDE for Android to develop full featured Android apps (We featured it in a TWIF, really sad that it has no future)
  • FreshRSS: Client for freshrss.org

Newly Added Apps

4 more apps were newly added
  • BiliDownOut: Export videos downloaded from the Android version of Bilibili App
  • Chaka Book Reader: An excellent Android book reader based on MuPDF Android Viewer
  • Dahdidahdit: An actual Morse code trainer, not just a Morse code generator
  • RomanDigital: Digital Clock App and Widget with Roman Numeral Display

Updated Apps

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

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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