I have been using droid-ify on GrapheneOS for a few years now; because F-Droid ui is terrible, and the privilege extention has been such a pain to configure and get working without issues on my previous lineageOS phone. Happy to see this major overhaul; and i'm glad the FPE is being phased out.
I think it is great that there are multiple clients out there, so people have a choice of user experience. One thing that I think is too often overlooked look is if they have implemented the same security and privacy standards as F-Droid, if that's important to you. For example, last I checked, the third party clients where still using index-v1, which is signed using SHA1. Maybe NeoStore updated to index-v2? And there is also quite a bit of effort put into the client-side to make sure it leaks as little as possible to the servers. There are libraries of the official core pieces for third party clients to use to gain many of these protections:
https://f-droid.org/2023/05/02/three-client-libraries.html
They could always close off access claiming ai scraping. If reddit shut their api down now instead of back then they could have also blamed ai and no one would’ve been mad.
I tried Neostore. All the info it shows is pretty cool, but ultimately I felt the expierence suffered from all the extra information shown compared to the simpler UI in Droid-ify.
I love Neo Store, because in my book complex > simple. Simplicity of interface = process handcuffs most of the time (IMO). Complexity done right permits so much diversity in composability. I would never ever want a 'simpler' After Effects or GIMP or Blender or Siemens NX. GNOME did it back with GNOME 3 and it has been trash in my book ever since! vomitface.gif
Sometim... err more times than not... there should be a "Your IQ must be at least this high" bar for good software. Stop appealing to the lower common denominators!
Thank you. Used it to uninstall F-droid and roll back to v1 after trying out this new update (ooof... full-blown material ui is not for me. Those progress bars, oh my eyes!)
The old f-droid client made selecting app updates easy. With both v2 and droid-ify, you have to click through for each app. Not a great interface decision :( Why do updates always dumb interfaces down these days?
I wasn't aware of that app. I will check that one out too.
FYI the obtainx sources current list is: Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN).
So "Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN)"
VS
"APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub"
so 3 chinese app stores vs APKMirror, APKPure and Aptoide, I think I'd trust more APKM over the rest, personally I update only from Github/Fdroid and APKPure/Aptoide I have disabled
It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things. No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap, no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off. I'm willing to chalk some bad text alignment or uneven padding up to amateur designers working for free, but the design ethos on display, the thoughtless trend-chasing, is depressing to see.
I've only seen the screenshots in the post, but those don't look confusing at all to me. A line between every section is not good or clear UI. I'd argue that grouping related entities by their proximity and leaving enough space in between sections is clearer. If you have to draw a line to make that distinction, they are probably too close.
In the case of the featured sections in the first screenshot, there should at minimum be a visual well indicating the horizontally scrollable strips. Invisible scroll panes are insane.
They’ve already made it obvious that the row is horizontally scrollable by leaving part of the next icon visible at the right edge. That's a clear (and standard) visual cue that there’s more content off-screen.
But... does the whole page scroll at once, and can I tap and drag "between" two rows (slightly above one, slightly below the other) to scroll the whole page? Or does each row scroll independently, and only taps on the row scroll? I habitually don't tap on anything that looks like an icon if I want to scroll around, because I'm afraid I'll activate the icon in a poorly written program (or if I tap too lightly and it is picked up as a tap and not a hold and drag event). So visual cues as to what's scrollable makes it easier for folks like me to know where to tap to scroll things properly.
this is an interesting take. I've never noticed but I just scroll by using a scrolling motion wherever on the screen, and I don't ever seem to hit a button by accident. It sounds like you are purposefully trying to find empty parts of the screen in order to scroll without the risk of hitting buttons. Modern devices are pretty good at figuring out whether you're scrolling or tapping tho. Have you tried just using a scrolling motion and not worrying about the location?
the icons can be scaled with the screen to always have a half icon on the end, just as other layouts scale the icons to always fit a whole number within the screen.
> It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things.
Where exactly would the UI benefit from "drawing lines"? I'd say the visual hierarchy is rather obvious.
I'll say more: most separators people use in their UIs are completely unnecessary. They should be used sporadically when you don't have a better way of segmenting the interface.
> No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap
What section of the UI are you referring to exactly? From the screenshots in their blog post it seems to me like the visual hierarchy is preserved and without using the app at least I can form an immediate expectation as to the function of each button. (And what is clickable and what isn't)
> no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off
What type of indication would you like to see here? I think most users intuitively understand that visual cue. An always-on scrollbar would introduce unnecessary clutter..
Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.
Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.
Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.
User activity heatmaps over the last five years increasingly show that users often tap on things they want regardless of whether that word/graphic/icon has any outward indication of being interactive.
Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.
Surely this should mean "debuff the design of the non-interactable elements (desaturate, shrink,...)" and not "crank up the interactable ones" or "make everything interact!"
Just like "customers keep running into our glass door" doesn't imply approval of glass and it doesn't mean you should turn everything into glass.
It's a race to the bottom. Users have to anticipate designers making inconsistent apps, so designers feel vindicated in their idiosyncratic and frankly user-hostile designs.
Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.
Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.
Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.
It's like herding cats to try to get consistent interfaces in software, in part because lots of people want to change the world with something new, and in part because UI is often an untested afterthought for people doing the 'real' work of launching features. For many devs, the downstream effects of actual UX design are an unknown unknown.
In addition to F-Droid on the device, I'd love an F-Droid "package manager client" on a computer, that allows installing apps on an Android device via adb:
# update repo lists
fdr update
# upgrade all apps on the connected device
fdr upgrade
# search packages
fdr search vlc # lists org.videolan.vlc
# install on the device
fdr install org.mozilla.firefox
# download the apk
fdr download org.mozilla.firefox
# uninstall
fdr uninstall org.mozilla.firefox
Of course, all operations would verify the signatures first.
Can someone recommend a good F/OSS ebook reader on F-Droid? The existing ones I have tested have too many knobs and options and are not really user-friendly.... My wife started to get into reading, but I could not get her to get out of the Kindle/Play Books ecosystem because of the user-friendliness and easy synchronisation across devices that Kindle gives.
Koreader interface with syncthing is not that user friendly to non techs, very powerful can do anything but i don't think i would advise that to non techie
To add to this, since the original comment mentioned kindle, you can jailbreak many of the models and install KOReader in them if you want to keep using the hardware.
And then you can automatically sync your reading process with the KOReader phone app. I use that functionality almost every day for when I don't have my Kindle with me (train ride, lunch break etc).
If you want a cross platform option that's pretty good across Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux, Readest[1] Is another great option. It supports syncing a library of ebooks and is licensed under the AGPL[2].
Librera. I found it daunting at first launch, but gave it a chance and once set up it's perfect. You could set it up for her and it would be as friendly as it gets.
For example, my usage now only ever goes like this:
1- Open Librera. Presented with a scrollable page of all book covers.
2- Scroll down to the epub I'm currently reading. Tap it once.
3- Resumes the book where I left off, with previous view settings. In my case full screen text with zero UI (tap once to hide the UI).
Koreader is far and away the best. Definitely suffers from the top many knobs problem but if you spend a little time to go through the settings and install a plugin like SimpleUI and Bookends you can get something set up that's ultimately pretty end user friendly and still very powerful. You can use anything you want to sync your library, Google drive, syncthing, self hosted solutions that expose opds, etc.
Try storyteller. It’s an awesome app that does the whispersync thing where you get the audiobook and ebook together, can switch between the two and not lose place, can read both at the same time where the ebook underlines what’s being said. All self hosted though so you need to have a way to…obtain drm free e/audio books.
Yeah I tried that and I actually still have it installed. It's better for pdfs because of reflow but the ui is too much with all the buttons. Ty for the suggestion though.
What I'm taking from this is that no one is happy about anything, ever. New design is fine. Old design is fine. I just want to search for an app and find that app, which is mostly what happens.
I appreciate all the hard work that goes into F-Droid <3
As someone who has upgraded OpenClaw and it has less capabilities due to security that I don't need for a VPS doing prototyping... I get the negativity when things change.
But fdroid is GOAT. They could make me hand type the exact app I want and I'm sure the app will be better than the ad ridden play store equivalent.
I let my kids have phones on road trips and I only installed educational games from fdroid.
No concern they will click buttons that are going to attempt to make a purchase or go to an external Web site.
This. But I indeed see some interesting features for me like better exploration and the difference between the list of updates apps and new apps.
It is really disappointing how much critique it gets, people complaining about stuff that has been bad for 15 years, but apparently the same people who were annoyed by it never contributed to fix it. I guess open source mentality is something else.
Also: while it is released, it is not yet marked as recommended. So I needed to upgrade manually. I assume they do this to get some feedback from early adopters. So I think people should either just wait or contribute.
is one of the first pieces of text in the first screenshot. With the k on its own line like that. Not usually something I’d comment on, but if you’re showing off a redesign…
Honestly I'd take that over the hostile vomit that is the google playstore. That thing is an offence to my senses...so many colors and animations trying to grab my attention.
It'll show you updates you haven't done since whatever time period I haven't figured out, but to actually check, from there you have to click 'Manage', then 'Updates available', then 'Check for updates.'
Typically, I have nothing waiting for me in updates, and have to do the above to expose 8 or so apps with updates available.
Absolutely. I'll search for a GOOGLE app to install on a new phone, and it's 3rd on the list, with two completely unrelated apps showing up at the top, waiting to be accidentally clicked and installed, and probably then start popping up ads and other malware.
It's annoying and easy to forget, but you have to enable the high-quality line break algorithm per Text component in Compose. Or you have to set two flags (maxLines=1 and overflow=TextOverflow.Ellipsis). I usually end up with a TitleText and BodyText component in my codebases that set these flags internally so I don't have to remember.
I wasn't sure if this was a joke about Android being unintuitive so I was sad to see that enabling high quality line breaks is indeed something you have to configure:
That app itself also has some of the most revolting UI I've seen in a modern Android app (Vertical gradient filled buttons with thick gray strokes surrounded by not-quite-Material UI widgets, in a nonsensical custom control they had to go out of their way to make rather than just use a dropdown). Android developers really just don't care.
I think anyone who differentiates between design and functionality has a profound misconception of what design should mean, and are the kind of people who produce terrible interfaces because they just see design as prettifying the functionality. That's why you get buttons that don't look clickable, lines where they're not needed, no lines where they are etc. Good design is a holistic practice, and in the case of apps the interface should be an integral part of the functionality. There's lots of literature out there about things like affordances, but many people don't know about it or don't care enough to use it in practice.
I'm talking specifically about the app SyncThing, though. I use it and rely on it, and I haven't opened it in over a month. It works as a background service.
In the literal sense, yes. But in this context it's obvious we are talking about UI/UX design. I am using the exact same terminology in the exact same manner as the person I replied to. So you either have poor reading comprehension or are being purposefully obtuse. Which is it? To be clear, if it is actually the former then you have my sympathy and I hope I cleared this up.
I personally think that software design skills naturally lend themselves to good UX and aesthetic design skills and you can infer one from the other. It's fine if you disagree and I should've said it less objectively
yes i would agree. nothing wrong with either one of those things, but if we are talking about open source you can't be mad the coder sucks at designing.
Do you rely on Google Play reviews? Those are known to be highly manipulated and you can find any number of services offering to "boost" your reviews. I personally find online posts where people discuss about some app to have more meaningful feedback on it.
I rarely look for positive reviews, these are often the ones that are manipulated. Negative reviews are usually more interesting, they can be fake too, but, marketing campaigns are usually more focused on promoting your own product than undermining your competitors.
You still need judgment, many negative reviews come from people who don't understand the app and where the problem comes from outside the app control. Common with apps that interface with hardware, for example, if you have a remote control app that makes use of a IR blaster, some people will complain that it doesn't work, but that's just because they don't have a IR blaster. But some are clear red flags like "wants me to create an account for not good reason", "intrusive ads", regular mentions of crashes or "since the last version..." comments which suggest enshittification.
I use F-Droid precisely because I don't want that. When https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505229 happened - and when the same thing happens again in the future, because it will - I explicitly want F-Droid doing some basic due diligence on updates before shipping them to me. Cutting out the middleman is the opposite of what I want.
Counterpoint: I use NewPipe pretty much daily for watching YouTube. One day, YT introduced an API change that broke NewPipe, and so I patiently waited for an update.
A few days passed, and I eventually get a notification from NewPipe prompting for an update. But I can't install it just yet, because of mismatching signatures between the F-Droid and GitHub versions (yes, that's the point, I know...). The F-Droid build took so long to release, that in the meantime, another version of NewPipe came out...
This issue happens to some extent within liunux distros too. I think specifically for youtube maybe it would be beneficial for a single core library that deals with the API and is shared by every single project that cares to interface with youtube. Rather than dozens of projects trying to chase youtube changes and overburdening repository maintainers, there would only be a single library whose updates would be fast tracked. This also requires there to be no embedding it in anything too, I don't know how feasible this would be on android/f-droid, but it kinda already happens with yt-dlp in linux distros, but yt-dlp isn't a proper library nor does it deals with all youtube endpoints that a proper youtube frontend would require.
It would perhaps be nice if yt-dlp could eject it's youtube api handling into it's own project that is then augmented to handle anything youtube related and turns into THE library for dealing with youtube.. maybe even call it libyt :)
Notably, this is still cutting out the middleman and bypassing the extra review that that entails. It's fine as long as you trust everybody involved in publishing the repo, which is probably fine here, but a thing to keep in mind.
True. And especially for that use, I can imagine that the slow return around is actually a breaking problem. I think there are relatively few apps that need that kind of quick update, and I'm more concerned with malicious authors than that, but it would depend on precisely what you need out of your apps.
I ran into the same issue. The good news is that app is the only one I've had to uninstall and reinstall from an apk because fdroid was so insanely slow. I wish they made an effort to keep up with apps where they need to be updated frequently and stop working entirely if they aren't updated. I can't imagine there are too many apps like that
I've never actually had this issue, for whatever reason. In-app updates to NewPipe (and the various forks) install just fine even if I originally downloaded from F-Droid. Not sure how that works exactly.
I tried Obtainium a while back and didn't like it too much, finding apps seemed difficult.
Then I discovered https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ which makes it very easy. I feel like Obtainium should make this more obvious. It would help adoption a lot.
Fwiw, that link is documented in the readme at https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium so it's not hard for someone to find again. It's also prominent in the Obtainium app UI itself.
I tried it with 3 random apps for a while, but instantly got into issues. Two stopped updating due to Obtanium falling behind how app releases - for instance, developer changed version numbering scheme but Obtanium didn't expect that, so an outdated version was always presented. It wasn't fixed for quite a while.
I have 23 currently. It's surprising how fast it happened... I don't have any problems, but I don't pay much attention to it and apps seem to update automatically sometimes and after a manual refresh other times.
I've found Droid-ify more reliable at doing background updates, though it still only manages it sometimes (possibly due in some way to how I installed the apps). Hopefully Fdroid's app will be better at this.
You can use APKUpdater instead, it supports APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub, I tried Obtainium and it was PITA to set up, I am much happier with APKUpdater for apps not covered by Aurora Store
The other way is to use fdroid as source within obtainium.
The benefit is to maintain app list at one place, so you can export/import to another device, when needed.
Super rare? The government seems to release only on an obscure source called Play for some reason. I don't want to play a game, just to ride the transit system. There seem to be a lot of apps that don't release on such an addable source..
I feel like f-droid is still very much a developer / advanced power user tool. I have not tried the 2.0 release candidate yet but with my version I get things like
> F-Droid: Repo timestamp expected 1790110069568, but was 1790205675224
IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repo: Repo timestamp expected 1790100093000, but was 1790272636000
The real problem I think is who should this message go to? My guess is we don't want to have mindless telemetry going from every single user to some central database or repository somewhere. My injection isn't even privacy here. It is that when we have lots of data coming from all over the world, I am afraid someone still has to sift through all this data and make sense of it but we can only understand and prioritize things we already know or are at least able to understand. I feel like this is pulling us in different directions — we want a simpler interface but we also want to expose all sorts of application states that require advanced understanding of how the system works. And someone needs to decide which bucket any particular message goes to — perhaps there is a more opaque but less frightening message like "sync had a hiccup, will retry" or even no message at all surfaces to the user unless it fails multiple consecutive times for the simple, default bucket and more verbose more frequent messages for those who want to see them?
But then even as I write this I can feel like this adds more maintenance headache, even as I push decision making to avoid having to think about a default, I still have to think about a default. The more I think about it, the less sure I am.
I agree. The new version should be better for normal users which should help make F-droid more popular and maybe a real alternative to the Play store for people in general, not just power users.
Since F-Droid (i.e., the repositories, not the app) builds all apps, a practical solution would be for the repositories (i.e., their signing keys) to be recognized by El Goog. Whether and how much help / obstacle the "maybe we do evil" company puts up for / against this is a different question.
The Emacs version for Android makes uses of something like this IIRC by signing a version of Termux with the same key and distributing it in the same SourceForge repo such that Emacs on Android can access CLI tooling like git for example.
It seems to me this is a blocker to use if google can restrict sideloading like this. Its not going to end with just get people requiring to register their app with an identity. Wont they be able to put presser on f-droid devs to lock out software they consider a threat to some business model?
That newspeak term should just disappeared. It only contributes to the image that downloading and installing an app is something that is outside the "happy path". Installing software of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be demonised
Surely you see how installing unvetted software on a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc. probably shouldn't be part of the "happy path" for most people. You shouldn't even install software you haven't fully vetted from the google play store. This should be drilled into non-technical people.
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
> a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
How do you get around this? Literally every bank, brokerage, etc... is hell bent on you using your phone for everything from 2FA to passkeys, etc... They dont even imagine people have computers anymore or want two+ physical devices/controls on what can be done with which factors
It requires collective action. Ideally with laws to force interoperability, so folks can move among platforms with ease. Then standards will arise to keep that feasible for app makers.
Without regulation markets coalesce as the winners eat each other like a game of snake. It's a miracle Apple hasn't yet eliminated Android. Although I suppose for some institutions there is only iPhone.
Certainly you can use those, but they're not mandatory (here in Canada at least). Can easily get a card and use physical bank and ATM to do everything, and website logins use email as 2fa.
Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.
It was true then and it is true now. Outside businesspeople and students and the middle class of OECD countries (all amounting to a low single-digit percentage of the world population), ordinary people never bought desktop or laptop computers. By contrast, everyone has a mobile one in their pocket today.
More likely you're living in a bubble unrepresentative of the rest of the world. I just did some research, inconclusive because nobody is tracking this data. Personal-computer ownership in rich countries (i.e. "OECD") is indeed high. But only 12% of the world's population lives in Europe and North America combined. The figure is much much lower elsewhere in the world, where everyone lives. For example, 16 computers per 100 people in Brazil in the 2010s. [1] Most people in the world have never touched a laptop or desktop. Now that computing has gone mobile-first, the figure is only going to keep dropping.
> And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.
FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.
> The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use.
There are unconnected photoTAN devices that support this. They have a camera that reads a QR code. Some European banks use this. E.g. Vasco digipass 770
Yeah, compared to separate hardware HSMs mobile banking is a massive downgrade in both security as well as user being in control of the hardware they own (by forcing locked down closer source OS & forcing hardware updates).
If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.
The world may not of ended but to of people have been hurt by malware ruining their computer, cryptolocking all of their company's files for ransom, stealing all of your login credentials, stealing cryptocurrency, taking secret photos with your webcam, screen recording what you are doing on your computer, etc.
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
For many decades, people have been mistakenly putting diesel fuel into their gasoline cars, yet we never outlawed diesel vehicles. You can only do so much to protect people without destroying their rights to their property.
It is much rarer since it needs 0 day to do these at the same level as possible on a pc. The play store scanning apps for malware is an important safety mechanism against this. Further more imposter apps like YouTube but with no ads that are Trojans that steal people's accounts.
Or the accessibility permission, or to some degree the access all files ones; but it's also enough for the app to pilfer the data you trust it with.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
Have you ever tried to educate a 70+ year old person on this kind of stuff? Their eyes gloss over and they don't care. I've told my mother not to install random apps on her phone several times yet she still does it. I could probably send her a phishing e-mail right now that 'looks like' it's from me (so long as my name is in the from: field that's enough) and she'd follow the instructions to install a malicious apk too.
"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.
The answer to people refusing to care about important things in life is not to put restrictions upon everyone's freedom. Ultimately, being an adult means you have to take responsibility for your actions (or lack thereof). It isn't hard to learn how to use a computer responsibly, and I've known plenty of older people who did so just fine. There's no excuse here.
You do understand we've broadly come to the conclusion that this isn't how society should work though, correct? It's why there's warning labels on everything, liability for not warning people for even the dumbest of things they might do with your product or in your establishment, extremely strict laws for things like driving a car, flying an airplane, or using any kind of heavy machinery, responsibility of servers to cut people off if they've had too much alcohol, the list goes on. I find intelligent people often have this mindset that all "real adults" are just as responsible as they are. It's just not the case.
And I generally wouldn't care "have at it" if their phone/computer being compromised only harmed them. But a bulk amount of compromised devices harms us all.
"Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that!" -George Carlin
yes, got my father on linux a decade (or more) ago. He's 84. No problem. Most recently we discussed being vigilant against vishing.
Now my in-laws (similar age) one very demented, the other thinks he knows best because he was a chemical engineer...they could use some built in protections
so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
>so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.
Given Google's track record, I don't think it's just "being upset" to have serious doubts about the probability of this escape hatch staying indefinitely.
But that's just a completely different discussion that we could've had a long time ago when they introduced it as a on/off security setting ~15-20 years ago too (and I bet people did). IMO nothing has changed except I bet more people will take going into developer options, being sternly warned, then having to wait 24 hours as a sign this is something maybe they shouldn't be doing. And I'd argue if you come to that conclusion and don't look into it further you're probably right,
Given that google is now forced to have competing app stores due to Epic v. Google and the ninth circuit courts went into long and arduous detail in that anti-trust case about sideloading restrictions I don't think they have a leg to stand on if they get rid of sideloading completely. Oddly Apple continues to get away with it no problem.
This description is downplaying what's changing by a lot. The way you present it, they're merely adding a 24h wait time to the existing local "unknown sources" toggle.
They've been chipping away at AOSP for years, pulling more and more parts of the Android experience into their proprietary Google Play Services. In this case, they're doubling down in the same direction. Sure, it may be more or less transparent from a user-facing perspective, but it's a fundamental change to the model.
Previously, it was ultimately a local decision: Android warned you, you enabled the permission, and you installed the APK. It now becomes dependent on a Google-controlled verification/authorization mechanism. That's fundamentally different from making the existing "unknown sources" toggle more annoying.
Google is the one peddling the malware. Any changes to 'security' that don't start with them removing the oodles of malware from their store are not security but profit driven.
It is like saying that you should not have free speech because someone might influence 70+ to say stupid stuff (well, that is already happening...).
Family should be responsible on education or making phone of people that are not educated enough (minors, elderly, etc.) limited - I do that using Family Link. I have there my child and also my in-laws - both of them can't install new apps without my permission.
So the tech is already there, one just needs to use it.
What about an entire family of people who have no interest in learning technology they just want the shady ad-free youtube on their phone? I find it perplexing you've never met people like this. I'd wager it's more common than not in our world.
There is no way to have no "shady ad-free" on Google play. Have you tried installing anything that is free? Games for example? There are ads every few minutes that you either wait or accidentally click on them and you install another approved google play app, that has similar ads.
Look at apps on fdroid, no such thing.
So the solution is simple - ban google play and allow only fdroid if one wants good apps.
You can't protect everyone. Just like there are people oblivious to bad eating habits - it is a tax on ignorance.
That would be like requiring people taking driving lessons before driving cars - what nonsense! Just let them behind the wheel & they will figure it out just fine!
I'm not sure the situations are comparable when Windows doesn't have this permission system where the apps are still very limited in what they can access unless you grant specific directory access or access to the contact list or such
It does, but approximately nobody uses it, because Microsoft also tried to apply loads of constraints on what kinds of program could exist when they rolled it out, as part of their "all Windows software should also work on Windows Phone and Xbox" campaign.
If the issue Google has with sideloading is really just the rampant app piracy (and the malware that comes with cracked apps) that might be something F-Droid can accomodate.
I don't think malware is the problem, as most malware comes directly via Google's ecosystem carried by ads. Just recently I had to uninstall some app from the play store since it tried to distribute malware through scary pop-ups and had it replaced with something from f-droid for someone I know.
> most malware comes directly via Google's ecosystem carried by ads.
Google's own Play Store is filled with outright malware too, no ads needed. The idea that Google has to control what people are allowed to install on their phones isn't really for the protection of anyone except Google.
It seems google is going to allow an "advanced flow" that is scam resistant by requiring the user to wait 24 hours before they can start installing their own apps. It sucks, but assuming they don't change the plan again, F-Droid should be able to continue working.
It's already live, I had to go through it last week. It's in developer options, then it asks if you're moving the selector to allow the installation of non-play store apps because you're being asked to by someone.
Then it starts a 24 hour timer. When that hits zero, you have 1 hour to go back in and select that you want to install apps on a device you own and paid money to own.
It's not scam-resistant at all. Any scammer will gladly work around this and send someone to one of many malicious apps in the play store, or a malicious URL, or even just set an appointment to call Grandma back the next day.
They're not necessarily wrong about it being scam resistant, based on some of the research into the psychology of scams. Adding time defuses the urgency of phone scams, leaving plenty of time to seek a second opinion from family members or the internet, and forcing the scammer to re-explain what the original goal was. It's too much time to breathe and defuses the fight or flight reaction needed for a high success rate. You mention URLs, but a web browser based scam page doesn't accomplish much, because the scammer's goal with fake apps is to acquire persistent remote access (akin to how the AnyDesk Android app uses accessibility permissions for Teamviewer-like remote access to an entire phone).
But yeah, it's hilarious that they're pushing this so hard when the Google Play Store still has so much malware.
What? It only stays enabled for exactly 1 hour after the 24 hour timer?
I was under the impression that it would stay enabled permanently after waiting the 24 hours once.
IIRC, it's the button to permanently activate it that is only available for one hour. Once you do manage to press it, you've permanently enabled it. If you miss the window, you have to start the 24 hours again.
So basically Google is being now more of an asshole than Apple (that now allows app sideloading and third party stores, at least in the EU). I'm and Android user since the beginning and for once I'm start considering for the next phone that I could as well get an iPhone, basically all the good open stuff of Android is long gone (back in the days I used to flash a new ROM every week), and at least Apple is better in regards of privacy than Google.
The current lockdown plan is that you'll need to wait 24 hours before installing the first unauthorized app, right? So probably exactly the same as it is now except setting up a phone will take 24 hours longer.
It looks exactly the same as now. You will have to do Google's 24 hour flow thing, but it's not like that's going to stop anyone who appreciates what F-droid brings to the table.
Isn't it possible, however complicated, for users to undo the lockdown to install an app? The required 9 steps are noted at https://keepandroidopen.org/ for devices that use Google Play Services.
Irrespective, people should probably be migrating to a GrapheneOS or similar OS asap once the OS ships with a device.
Honestly not as bad as I feared it would be. Still not great and it's moving us farther from the idea that people who paid for the device should be allowed to install what they want on it, but as it stands it's a workable process. We'll see how quickly it takes Google to make it worse
Currently, switching to GrapheneOS means giving Google money. Next year's Motorola-based alternative is also likely going to be several price classes above the Pixels you can currently put GrapheneOS on.
Then buy a Pixel second-hand or when they hit rock-bottom prices, which usually happens after 6 months or so. At some point Google is probably not making a lot of profit from the devices anymore and they want to sell it to you for tracking and to sell Google One subscriptions, which are mostly irrelevant if you use GrapheneOS.
I followed Pixel prices for the last year, and rock-bottom for a 256gb version (the current absolute minimum for a device without an sd, to my eyes) meant 450€.
There are occasional good deals for (unused) older models on eBay, but they're surprisingly rare.
I wonder if Google demands stores to give the old models back, after the release of newer ones; they disappear from every store extremely quickly.
Interesting, here you can still buy the P10 and P10P for hundreds of Euros off and the prices are still trending down. Also many stores still have them. This is not surprising, because Google still sells them themselves, just in fewer colors and storage tiers.
I've tried $1000 phones before and found that they don't do anything different than my cheap phone, other than taking better quality pictures. But at least my cheap phone has an SD card slot and a headphone jack.
The latest pixels are a complete downgrade from the previous year (worse components). That's one huge reason to buy a last year phone (as opposed to a current one).
Updates on this have been slowly trickling out and the best I can discern is you will be able to still install apps from stores like F-Droid, but you have to go through a manual "advanced flow" which will most likely make you wait 24 hours before installing it and make you go through other hoops.
In short, google has referred to this as "increased user friction" to try and deter people from doing this. Essentially not making it impossible; just really frustrating for users so they get sick of the process and just install verified apps through them.
The only way I know around this is to install a custom rom like GrapheneOS or Lineage OS since this change targets Because the policy targets the Google Mobile Services (GMS) framework rather than the foundational Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Users and maintained packages would probably go down due to less users being able to use it, but users of Android (see GrapheneOS, LineageOS) without Google's Rookit can and will still continue to use it.
There is an entire world of Android phones not controlled by Google, including GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and countless variations in China and other places where Google is effectively banned.
From an Android developer perspective, not good. All apps on f-droid will have to be certified by the developer with Google (it's per-app I checked) otherwise they won't work at all. And the process of not easy, even for a verified play store developer, I still have to jump through hoops to register.
Then you have to explain to users how to enable this. Not too mention the onerous F-droid requirements for publishing, it's bad enough as it is.
Average users are not going to do this, just like Google wants. Hopefully someone sues them and wins or we get Linux phones, not holding my breath though
Very cool, the visual redesign was very much needed and I had been using Droid-ify for a while because of this. I'll switch back to the official app, congrats to the contributors!
I've just recently started to use F-Droid and discovered a lot of nice tools without ads and bloatware. Some of my favorites are Breeze, a weather forecast app, and Seal, a facade for yt-downloader that allows me to break the walls of social networks.
I think F-Droid is a great way to discover apps, but I'm not sure I would trust a binary downloaded from its repository the same I trust a binary downloaded from the app's official website or repository. I also remember a few apps clearly stating the F-Droid repo was a few versions behind and the "right" way was to install from their page.
Anyway, this might all become moot very soon if Google prevents us from installing anything from 3rd-party sources.
The builds are reproducible. Developers can also choose to fetch binaries directly from their repositories, and fdroid will verify that those binaries match the sources. So this is actually safer than downloading directly from developer's repo.
Repo timestamp expected blah blah... toast coming out of nowhere is such a bad design. Really, the architecture in which you absolutely have to download the multi-MB index is as well.
Dear F-Droud, please stop redirecting me to the Mandarin version automatically without an option to read the original message. Just because I have a Chinese keyboard layout available.
First hit for 'check http headers', in case that helps find out why websites think you want Chinese content. Maybe it's a bug in the website; maybe it's set as your first preference. Please report the bug if there is one!
That's strange, sounds worth reporting. They should be able to tell you if there's anything else to check (maybe some javascript interface says Chinese is the way to go) or if it's really just some strange bug on their end (misdetection of the ip address or so)
Amazing news! I mainly use the F-droid Basic version which does automatic updating of apps. The regular one needs user confirmation for updates if I remember correctly.
For people who are die-hard F Droid users, do you get all your apps from it? I have tried in the past but it seemed like even when I restricted my use to basics it was missing things I needed to make my phone feel useful. Wonder if it has gotten better.
Most of them, yeah. My main non-F-Droid apps are YT-Music, Google Maps, Duo auth, Bible, and my bank app. Firefox, podcasts, local music player, ebook reader, RSS reader, email client, Matrix client, XMPP client, audiobook player, calendar sync, KeePassDX, SyncThing, Nix terminal, etc are all F-Droid.
Yes, essentially. I do have the Guardian Project repository and I get a handful of applications from the Play Store (via Aurora Store), but everything else comes from F-Droid. If you want even more, you can add the IzzyOnDroid repository[0], but bear in mind that unlike F-Droid, applications are built by developers themselves, and the rules on FOSS-only licensing are less strict.
It works. I see updates from just 3 hours ago, and generally updates have been pretty constant (I use Shizuku for auto-updates) though manual updates sometimes fail.
It did yesterday, for me.
Sometimes it doesn't work for a while and the dev needs some time catching up to what Google deliberately or inadvertently or indifferently put in the way of access to the place where apps are published (and they are published there, not because app creators deliberately chose Google out of many app distributors in some healthy competitive market; there is no choice).
The Aurora project accepts donations, if you want to hurry things along some time! And they have a donation button right there in the app listing, try doing that for yourapp in the PlayStore and see who comes knocking in 3...2..1 to make you a non-person.
What do you find is missing? The main apps I need Google Play for are apps that are tied to a specific company or government service (eg, banking apps, or HMRC). For pretty much all basic functions I think F-Droid does the job.
Store and restaurant apps, discord, streaming apps, most games, payment apps, apps for school, ride-sharing. I tried the "degoogle" way and tossed after two days because that's impossible unless you're willing to adopt a more expensive boomer/millennial lifestyle.
It is not my main device, nor even my secondary device. It’s basically just a device I bought for cheap hoping that maybe I was lucky and it was actually pretty snappy. It’s not snappy :(
I occasionally watch a couple of YouTube videos on it and read a couple of HN posts on it, when my phone is out of battery or when I’m doing a backup of my phone and have left the phone on the table for that.
Anyway, aside from YouTube the other apps I have installed on it myself are all from F-Droid, including the DuckDuckGo browser that I use on it. I also have Signal on it, which I don’t remember if I installed from F-Droid or from Google Play.
My main device that I actually use a lot is an iPhone. And like I said I basically only use the tablet like a couple of hours a week and only to watch a couple of YouTube videos and read a couple HN threads, when I am not able to use my phone for those things.
Fossify Clock has the best accidental feature: when your alarm is going off, there's no way to stop it except for unlocking your phone, opening the app, finding the current alarm in the list of alarms, and disabling it.
I only use it to install the apps that aren't available on the Play store (e.g. Öffi, an excellent public transit app that gave up on dealing with the Play store after one too many arbitrary removals, Termux, and NewPipe).
The user experience was just too broken for too long to consider it usable (didn't support background updates for about two years after Google made it available, and generally just too much jank and random errors/failures). I might look into it the next time I'm setting up a device, but I think for the majority of apps I'll still go through the Play store - I don't trust F-Droid to be stable/reliable enough yet.
No I have Obtainium side by side with F-Droid. There are some closed source apps or apps that are not published on F-Droid (like Wireguard) that unfortunately I need. Obtainium is great for that.
Aurora works fine for me, and Google's software needn't chug along in a background sandbox no matter if all it can do is install apps, ping back to the mothership what your IP address currently is, and act as a proxy for other apps whose direct internet access you try to deny
No... I use a combination of Aurora, Obtainium and F-Droid.
Unfortunately there are APP providers actively preventing their apps to work on graphene OS, so i own an extra use@home cheap broken glass iphone for these mandatory but non-graphene apps.
It is a pain and it is getting worse... I'm really tempted to get back to the Apple ecosystem for less shens but currently i cannot do this yet... It just feels wrong but the pain is real. I'm Lösung the fight of investing too mich of my time in things that just should work.
I use droid-ify as frontend; and it's been fine to use f-droid repos for most of my needs. I try to install my apps from there in general. Biggest issue for me is android auto capability usually requires the app to be installed from play store (CoMaps) and my music player app (GoneMAD) has a companion unlocker that is from paid app store.
I need banking and bunch of vendor related apps. I need play store for them; so not full on f-droid repos. But close-ish when it comes to phone functionality.
When I need some category of app - say a note app or an audiobook player - I generally check F-Droid first.
If there's a good enough app on there, I generally stick with that as opposed to trying what Google Play has to offer.
I like having that prefiltering, knowing that the app will be open source, not trying to pull anything shady and not have ads or sell my data. On the Play Store, more often than not, at least one of those is not true.
Similar experience for me. I find f-droid a great supplement store but cutting out the default store entirely has felt like more of a commitment than I'm interested in so far.
I wouldn't use F-Droid exclusively. Many apps can simply be downloaded from their respective webpages. GrapheneOS also has also its own very basic app store.
FDroid offers the guarantee that the apk was built from source, and at least some marginal safety in terms of having passed their security and analytics/ads checkers.
Obtainium makes it easy to download apps directly from their webpages. Many of them have ready configurations you can simply add: https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/
With F-Droid (at least the main repo) you get extra guarantees that the apk is built by them. A thirdparty store also updates your apps, so you're not stuck at an old outdated version. I do use both F-Droid and Obtainium though.
Great! But why hasn't 2.0 installed automatically on all devices that already have F-Droid?
- go to F-Droid -> Updates. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- refresh the repositories. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- search directly for f-droid in apps. "This app was built for an older version of Android and cannot be updated automatically."
*facepalm* never change, F-Droid. You might not be able to automatically update the app because of Android API restrictions, but there's no reason your app can't tell me it knows there's an updated version I could be asked to apply manually, is there?
EDIT: it still says version 1.23.2 is "Suggested" even when 2.0 is installed. Perhaps this is a reason? Nonetheless, there's no setting to choose a different version policy, i.e. install 2.0 because it's newer, even if not "Suggested"
What does "Suggested" even mean? According to https://forum.f-droid.org/t/how-does-f-droid-suggest-a-versi... it's set manually by the person maintaining the metadata, which makes it even more of a facepalm if F-Droid are announcing 2.0 on their homepage but nobody set CurrenVersion=2.0 in their own metadata.
Where can I actually download the F-Droid 2.0 APK ? Their page directs me to the old version & the old version does not look like it wants to update itself to 2.0... :P
I haven't used F-Droid since the age of Copperhead when I had an Android phone sitting around for testing purposes only. I never thought it would catch a wave like it has, but I also wasn't really thinking about geopolitical upheaval (not often or entirely seriously anyway) or tech companies angering (this much) everyone, but it is nice to see.
I never got around to trying the Copperhead successor in Graphene.
The relevant part might be “Android offers all app stores an option for a smoother and more automatic install and update experience than before. F-Droid 2.0 includes groundbreaking work on utilizing these new abilities. This allows F-Droid to use a unified installer for all F-Droid installs”.
Giving it the proper App Store feeling.
> Also, F-Droid Privileged Extension (FPE) is not currently supported by 2.0. That means even if FPE is installed, F-Droid 2.0 won’t use it. This overhaul focused on full featured support for the Android “session” installer. That lets F-Droid run background updates on any recent Android version without requiring FPE. Like with any of the changes here, we welcome feedback.
This is a shame. Is the privileged extension a large maintenance burden?
When Google added the "session" installer to AOSP, we thought it would replace F-Droid Privileged Extension (FPE). So we stopped development on it. The answer now is that the "session" installer mostly replaces FPE, but not fully. So we're exploring reviving development:
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/privileged-extension/-/work_items/...
No, but the issue linked by eighthave sums up my thoughts about the session installer nicely:
> Android provides two APIs for installing apps: a “privileged” API for things built in, and a “session” API for third-party apps. The built-in API provides key UX improvements, but is quite restricted due to the security architecture. The third-party API is not used by Google at all, and therefore it is buggy and receives sub-par maintenance. Also, Google is motivated to keep it lower quality since all apps that use it are inherently competitors to Google Play. The additional system prompts and potential instability owing to frequent changes in Google’s SDK requirements may frustrate users, particularly those who are not tech-savvy.
Other things not mentioned:
- updating applications with adb or the package installer (e.g. by downloading and opening the APK) seems to force F-Droid to show the dialog again
- applications are not eligible if their minimum API version is too low, meaning you get a prompt on every update
All in all I see no reason to put up with subpar installation UX just because Google doesn't endorse the store I use.
2. Please donate a few EUR/bucks to F-Droid! It's a good place to get Android apps from, and we can't all just mooch off of it. Doesn't have to be a big donation.
3. I am worried that Alpahbet/Google will kill these "unauthorized" apps soon, so that the new version arriving would be kind of bittersweet. Although - maybe I'll just need to switch to LineageOS or something.
Yes. F-droid allows that, you can have multiple repositories and ... a few of those even exist :)
I'm using that with 2.0 (or rather with F-droid Basic, but I noticed Basic was updated to the same that is described in article, but a while ago). It works just fine.
I hope the new redesign makes the store easier to navigate on TVs. It's a nightmare trying to install/update apps on F-Droid on either my Nvidia Shield Pro or my Onn 4K TV using the tv remote. The cursor gets lost all the time and it's often impossible to see what option is currently in focus when you click Ok on the remote.
I just downloaded neostore yesterday because I kept on downloading garbo from fdroid because I had no way of seeing which apps were downloaded a lot (which isn't perfect but pretty good test for the quality of lets say a local music player).
Good on fdroid. Will be removing neostore and going back to fdroid.
Can't you at least see and file issues and discussions on the respective app's code repo site? This is often although not always sufficient, as the repo owner can censor issues and discussions.
Google has for years censored app reviews anyway on its Play Store, and also allowed too many low-value reviews which drown out useful reviews.
Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
The answer to freedom isn't another marketplace. It's legislation that requires Google and Apple to allow web installs without scare walls or deeply hidden permission toggles.
You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
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Edit because of rate limits:
This is not derogatory. This is making the point that the wrong battle is being fought. F-droid fans are cheering a small victory, yet losing the entire war.
F-droid does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's not the point. The point is the app store monopoly. That there are only two platforms and that both are almost completely locked down.
F-droid users don't even see that Google is purposefully allowing this as an antitrust sponge in their calculus. Google doesn't mind because 0.0001% of their users will install this. If they had a sense that the regulators wouldn't bother them, they'd just as well close this loophole. And they probably will eventually.
This isn't beachhead, and even if it was, it isn't sound footing or a stable foundation. It can easily go away.
> Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
What? I'm not sure how you would manage to waste hours installing a single app and then using it to install other apps, and I'm not using it because of "altruism" (what does that even mean?), I'm using it because it's the best way to get apps.
> You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
> There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
Even if you 100% trust Android's sandboxing and permissions, which is... not a choice I would personally make, I like it when my apps don't have scams or ads internally, either. I'm not worried about Grandma downloading any app off F-Droid; I am a little concerned about what happens if she can download any app being pushed by any random website.
I don't use F-Droid often, so maybe my take isn't worth much. But when I opened the new version, I found myself a bit lost. Maybe I just need more time to get used to it.
Not any super user but about three/four months, I'm using my device without any google account. Also not using any G service apps such as mail/yt/maps and of course play store. Instead of play store I found aurora store very helpful. "Very" because of the anonymous login future. But sometimes the store disturbs. Newly added apps on Play store doesn't appears on aurora. Also many applications fails to be installed without showing any reason. Some shitty apps redirect to the play store app (which I'm unable to disable but uninstalled her! Updates) and just doesn't works anything more then redirecting me. So I'm still not a fan of Aurora. But it's going not bad. But sometimes I should browse other sites to get old/delated from Play store apps. Also for mod/adless version of some apps.
I heard of fdriod but what I think it may only serves feature less, low UI/UX optimized apps. So didn't installed it yet. But something should be available where people can find all Play store apps (as aurora supplies) + premium/adsense deleted modified apps (random website) + Open source apps (fdroid)…… this will make android insane
GrapheneOS security complaints about F-Droid are a load of nonsense except for one: the APK on the website is signed by a different key from the one that F-Droid updates itself with.
> All new code in this effort uses modern Android code standards and designs. This gives us a codebase that is easier to maintain, test, and easier to extend with new features in the future.
No, this increases the overall complexity of the system. Android will hopefully eventually collapse under its own weight.
Running a malicious build script is just as bad as running a malicious app, so I don´t see why you want that? Also F-droid has fully reproducible builds, so you can be sure you'll get the same binary.
Speed. Most people are going to choose a fast binary download + automated integrity check over compiling from source, regardless of their reason for using F-Droid.
I have been using droid-ify on GrapheneOS for a few years now; because F-Droid ui is terrible, and the privilege extention has been such a pain to configure and get working without issues on my previous lineageOS phone. Happy to see this major overhaul; and i'm glad the FPE is being phased out.
I think it is great that there are multiple clients out there, so people have a choice of user experience. One thing that I think is too often overlooked look is if they have implemented the same security and privacy standards as F-Droid, if that's important to you. For example, last I checked, the third party clients where still using index-v1, which is signed using SHA1. Maybe NeoStore updated to index-v2? And there is also quite a bit of effort put into the client-side to make sure it leaks as little as possible to the servers. There are libraries of the official core pieces for third party clients to use to gain many of these protections: https://f-droid.org/2023/05/02/three-client-libraries.html
They could always close off access claiming ai scraping. If reddit shut their api down now instead of back then they could have also blamed ai and no one would’ve been mad.
Why would Fdroid do that? They even package and offer some of these alternate clients in their own repository.
>I have been using droid-ify
After 10 years of F-droid, I'm bummed I only found droid-ify a couple of months ago. Sooo much better than F-droid.
Check out Neostore too. You'll love it.
I tried Neostore. All the info it shows is pretty cool, but ultimately I felt the expierence suffered from all the extra information shown compared to the simpler UI in Droid-ify.
I love Neo Store, because in my book complex > simple. Simplicity of interface = process handcuffs most of the time (IMO). Complexity done right permits so much diversity in composability. I would never ever want a 'simpler' After Effects or GIMP or Blender or Siemens NX. GNOME did it back with GNOME 3 and it has been trash in my book ever since! vomitface.gif
Sometim... err more times than not... there should be a "Your IQ must be at least this high" bar for good software. Stop appealing to the lower common denominators!
I run into UI glitches and crashes, and decide to not continue using it.
There's also Aurora Droid, last time I checked.
There's also F-Droid Classic. For me Droid-ify never felt quite right + it never worked properly with unattended updates, for me at least.
Thank you. Used it to uninstall F-droid and roll back to v1 after trying out this new update (ooof... full-blown material ui is not for me. Those progress bars, oh my eyes!)
The old f-droid client made selecting app updates easy. With both v2 and droid-ify, you have to click through for each app. Not a great interface decision :( Why do updates always dumb interfaces down these days?
What do you mean by "click through for each app"?
Why limit yourself only to F-Droid when in APK Updater you can have APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub?
https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
I don't really need app to discover other apps, I need app to install/update the apps I already know.
agree, droid-ify is very clean, been using it for 5 years now
Me too. But more and more I am using ObtainX now and installing from Github sources. I don't need F-Droid's gatekeeping.
I remember Obtainium being PITA to set up, is there any benefit in ObtainX over APKUpdater from rumboalla? Seems to have way more sources.
https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
I wasn't aware of that app. I will check that one out too.
FYI the obtainx sources current list is: Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN).
I only ever used Github so far.
So "Fdroid, Fdroid 3rd party, Forgejo(Codeberg), GitHub, GitLab, IzzyOnDroid, CoolApk, Tencent App Store, vivo App Store (CN)"
VS
"APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub"
so 3 chinese app stores vs APKMirror, APKPure and Aptoide, I think I'd trust more APKM over the rest, personally I update only from Github/Fdroid and APKPure/Aptoide I have disabled
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It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things. No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap, no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off. I'm willing to chalk some bad text alignment or uneven padding up to amateur designers working for free, but the design ethos on display, the thoughtless trend-chasing, is depressing to see.
I've only seen the screenshots in the post, but those don't look confusing at all to me. A line between every section is not good or clear UI. I'd argue that grouping related entities by their proximity and leaving enough space in between sections is clearer. If you have to draw a line to make that distinction, they are probably too close.
In the case of the featured sections in the first screenshot, there should at minimum be a visual well indicating the horizontally scrollable strips. Invisible scroll panes are insane.
They’ve already made it obvious that the row is horizontally scrollable by leaving part of the next icon visible at the right edge. That's a clear (and standard) visual cue that there’s more content off-screen.
But... does the whole page scroll at once, and can I tap and drag "between" two rows (slightly above one, slightly below the other) to scroll the whole page? Or does each row scroll independently, and only taps on the row scroll? I habitually don't tap on anything that looks like an icon if I want to scroll around, because I'm afraid I'll activate the icon in a poorly written program (or if I tap too lightly and it is picked up as a tap and not a hold and drag event). So visual cues as to what's scrollable makes it easier for folks like me to know where to tap to scroll things properly.
this is an interesting take. I've never noticed but I just scroll by using a scrolling motion wherever on the screen, and I don't ever seem to hit a button by accident. It sounds like you are purposefully trying to find empty parts of the screen in order to scroll without the risk of hitting buttons. Modern devices are pretty good at figuring out whether you're scrolling or tapping tho. Have you tried just using a scrolling motion and not worrying about the location?
If that clipped column of icons were like K-9's, which has a transparent background and left padding, those clipped icons wouldn't be visible.
Redundancy would be fine. It would help in edge-cases like that.
What happens if my screen width is a multiple of their icon size?
the icons can be scaled with the screen to always have a half icon on the end, just as other layouts scale the icons to always fit a whole number within the screen.
> It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things.
Where exactly would the UI benefit from "drawing lines"? I'd say the visual hierarchy is rather obvious.
I'll say more: most separators people use in their UIs are completely unnecessary. They should be used sporadically when you don't have a better way of segmenting the interface.
> No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap
What section of the UI are you referring to exactly? From the screenshots in their blog post it seems to me like the visual hierarchy is preserved and without using the app at least I can form an immediate expectation as to the function of each button. (And what is clickable and what isn't)
> no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off
What type of indication would you like to see here? I think most users intuitively understand that visual cue. An always-on scrollbar would introduce unnecessary clutter..
You would fit right in at Mozilla.
Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.
Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.
Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.
User activity heatmaps over the last five years increasingly show that users often tap on things they want regardless of whether that word/graphic/icon has any outward indication of being interactive.
Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.
Surely this should mean "debuff the design of the non-interactable elements (desaturate, shrink,...)" and not "crank up the interactable ones" or "make everything interact!"
Just like "customers keep running into our glass door" doesn't imply approval of glass and it doesn't mean you should turn everything into glass.
It's a race to the bottom. Users have to anticipate designers making inconsistent apps, so designers feel vindicated in their idiosyncratic and frankly user-hostile designs.
Such win-win horrors..
Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.
Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.
Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.
It's like herding cats to try to get consistent interfaces in software, in part because lots of people want to change the world with something new, and in part because UI is often an untested afterthought for people doing the 'real' work of launching features. For many devs, the downstream effects of actual UX design are an unknown unknown.
In addition to F-Droid on the device, I'd love an F-Droid "package manager client" on a computer, that allows installing apps on an Android device via adb:
Of course, all operations would verify the signatures first.Like https://github.com/Hoverth/fdroidcl ? :)
Can someone recommend a good F/OSS ebook reader on F-Droid? The existing ones I have tested have too many knobs and options and are not really user-friendly.... My wife started to get into reading, but I could not get her to get out of the Kindle/Play Books ecosystem because of the user-friendliness and easy synchronisation across devices that Kindle gives.
KOReader [1] is my favorite reader. Pairs well with my syncthing library of ebooks (I just keep the phone's copy in read-only mode).
[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid...
Koreader interface with syncthing is not that user friendly to non techs, very powerful can do anything but i don't think i would advise that to non techie
KOReader can update over WiFi as well, right?
You mean whether the KOreader software can upgrade itself over Wi-Fi? Yes... it can.
Episteme is pretty good
https://github.com/Aryan-Raj3112/episteme
Just to add, KOReader might not look super use friendly at first, but I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s an amazing reader.
Once your used to it, the controls are a lot better than stock kindle as well imo.
To add to this, since the original comment mentioned kindle, you can jailbreak many of the models and install KOReader in them if you want to keep using the hardware.
And then you can automatically sync your reading process with the KOReader phone app. I use that functionality almost every day for when I don't have my Kindle with me (train ride, lunch break etc).
Using readera with network connection disabled. Super app.
It depends.For me it’s not on app For a dedicated device(phablet/tablet) - KoReader. For Smartphone (no longtime reading) - Librera Reader
KOReader is good, as others have mentioned.
If you want a cross platform option that's pretty good across Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux, Readest[1] Is another great option. It supports syncing a library of ebooks and is licensed under the AGPL[2].
[1]: https://readest.com/
[2]: https://github.com/readest/readest
I actually use MuPDF for epubs, as well as pdfs.
Me too. It seems to be the only one that does not litter the sdcard directory.
[Liseur](https://github.com/chmouel/liseur) seems nice, if epub is an acceptable format. It's available on F-Droid.
Supposedly it can interface with various sync providers, but I've not tried this myself. The rendering is lovely.
Librera. I found it daunting at first launch, but gave it a chance and once set up it's perfect. You could set it up for her and it would be as friendly as it gets.
For example, my usage now only ever goes like this:
1- Open Librera. Presented with a scrollable page of all book covers.
2- Scroll down to the epub I'm currently reading. Tap it once.
3- Resumes the book where I left off, with previous view settings. In my case full screen text with zero UI (tap once to hide the UI).
Koreader is far and away the best. Definitely suffers from the top many knobs problem but if you spend a little time to go through the settings and install a plugin like SimpleUI and Bookends you can get something set up that's ultimately pretty end user friendly and still very powerful. You can use anything you want to sync your library, Google drive, syncthing, self hosted solutions that expose opds, etc.
i would say Librera FD, much better on Android than KOR, specially for images
Try storyteller. It’s an awesome app that does the whispersync thing where you get the audiobook and ebook together, can switch between the two and not lose place, can read both at the same time where the ebook underlines what’s being said. All self hosted though so you need to have a way to…obtain drm free e/audio books.
I run Calibre Content Server on a VM. So my ebook reading is just accessing that in the browser. Works great.
It's not on F-Droid, but I really like FBreader. You can get it directly from their website if you don't want to deal with the play store.
I have spent much time trying to solve this problem. KOreader is okay for looking at a document, but not for long reading sessions.
Unfortunately I have had to go proprietary and use readera premium, which works fine for epubs.
Try Librera if you haven't.
Yeah I tried that and I actually still have it installed. It's better for pdfs because of reflow but the ui is too much with all the buttons. Ty for the suggestion though.
Even if you have a FOSS ereader app with good sync, where are you gonna get books to read on it?
The only options are stripping the DRM from kobo books or piracy, last I checked.
No, there are a lot of DRM free books, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48709186 mentioned here or https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/ebooks more broadly.
Piracy and stripping DRMs though definitely work.
Not the answer to your question but... do your eyes a favor and use an e-ink device for reading.
You can thank me later (in 20 years).
FB reader? Sync has to be manually config though (Calibre is simplest but probably not for completely non-technical people)
just let her read on kindle, as you've said yourself it's a better option
Honestly I use Lithium with no network permissions. It's not Foss but it's good enough for me.
What I'm taking from this is that no one is happy about anything, ever. New design is fine. Old design is fine. I just want to search for an app and find that app, which is mostly what happens.
I appreciate all the hard work that goes into F-Droid <3
As someone who has upgraded OpenClaw and it has less capabilities due to security that I don't need for a VPS doing prototyping... I get the negativity when things change.
But fdroid is GOAT. They could make me hand type the exact app I want and I'm sure the app will be better than the ad ridden play store equivalent.
I let my kids have phones on road trips and I only installed educational games from fdroid.
No concern they will click buttons that are going to attempt to make a purchase or go to an external Web site.
Same story with guitar tuner apps.
They just work.
This. But I indeed see some interesting features for me like better exploration and the difference between the list of updates apps and new apps.
It is really disappointing how much critique it gets, people complaining about stuff that has been bad for 15 years, but apparently the same people who were annoyed by it never contributed to fix it. I guess open source mentality is something else.
Also: while it is released, it is not yet marked as recommended. So I needed to upgrade manually. I assume they do this to get some feedback from early adopters. So I think people should either just wait or contribute.
I came here to say this, and notice you already have. Thanks! :-)
I notice that
is one of the first pieces of text in the first screenshot. With the k on its own line like that. Not usually something I’d comment on, but if you’re showing off a redesign…Honestly I'd take that over the hostile vomit that is the google playstore. That thing is an offence to my senses...so many colors and animations trying to grab my attention.
Outside of that, they keep making the experience worse. It takes six nonintuitive clicks to check for app updates.
Long tap Play Store -> My apps -> Updates.
I also noticed that Google gets really offended if you turn off auto updates, and nags you hard to turn it back on.
Ooh, thanks for this. Also, long pressing "My apps", or pressing the (+) next to it, lets us create a homescreen icon directly to "My apps".
That saves 1 click(and thanks for that).
It'll show you updates you haven't done since whatever time period I haven't figured out, but to actually check, from there you have to click 'Manage', then 'Updates available', then 'Check for updates.'
Typically, I have nothing waiting for me in updates, and have to do the above to expose 8 or so apps with updates available.
What about for some reason cancelling YouTube premium on mobile requires you to go through the store to do it?
While we're on their subject, Amazon customer service chat can only be done on the app, not on browser on mobile.
The future is now!
On my Pixel I don't even open the Play store for this
Settings, System, Software Updates, App updates
Bonus that any OS or Google services updates are here too
Absolutely. I'll search for a GOOGLE app to install on a new phone, and it's 3rd on the list, with two completely unrelated apps showing up at the top, waiting to be accidentally clicked and installed, and probably then start popping up ads and other malware.
In the EU?
"F-Droid 2.0: better than hostile vomit"
^ 2026 in a nutshell
I mean, unfortunately it resonates for me. Hah
Not to mention the insurmountable amount of ads
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Hacker news people are unbearable. This is some next level nitpick.
It's annoying and easy to forget, but you have to enable the high-quality line break algorithm per Text component in Compose. Or you have to set two flags (maxLines=1 and overflow=TextOverflow.Ellipsis). I usually end up with a TitleText and BodyText component in my codebases that set these flags internally so I don't have to remember.
I wasn't sure if this was a joke about Android being unintuitive so I was sad to see that enabling high quality line breaks is indeed something you have to configure:
https://developer.android.com/develop/ui/compose/text/style-...
That document literally says that high quality option is the default.
No, it doesn't. It says:
> Should be a default
Meaning the developer should opt-in to this explicitly but choose it as the default option. The actual default is no strategy at all.
That app itself also has some of the most revolting UI I've seen in a modern Android app (Vertical gradient filled buttons with thick gray strokes surrounded by not-quite-Material UI widgets, in a nonsensical custom control they had to go out of their way to make rather than just use a dropdown). Android developers really just don't care.
its not an app you open much. I'd prefer them to spend time on the actual functionality
Good design is part of the functionality.
What word would you use to differentiate design and non-design functionality?
I think anyone who differentiates between design and functionality has a profound misconception of what design should mean, and are the kind of people who produce terrible interfaces because they just see design as prettifying the functionality. That's why you get buttons that don't look clickable, lines where they're not needed, no lines where they are etc. Good design is a holistic practice, and in the case of apps the interface should be an integral part of the functionality. There's lots of literature out there about things like affordances, but many people don't know about it or don't care enough to use it in practice.
I think the terms are usability Vs usefulness.
Business logic
UX vs UI?
If one says "Good design is part of the functionality", one can also say "Interface is part of the experience".
"can I do something [at all]" vs "how [easy] can I do something"
vs “can I even determine whether or not I can do something”
I'm talking specifically about the app SyncThing, though. I use it and rely on it, and I haven't opened it in over a month. It works as a background service.
Good design would do absolutely nothing for me.
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Programming is design. Good code requires design sense.
In the literal sense, yes. But in this context it's obvious we are talking about UI/UX design. I am using the exact same terminology in the exact same manner as the person I replied to. So you either have poor reading comprehension or are being purposefully obtuse. Which is it? To be clear, if it is actually the former then you have my sympathy and I hope I cleared this up.
I personally think that software design skills naturally lend themselves to good UX and aesthetic design skills and you can infer one from the other. It's fine if you disagree and I should've said it less objectively
There is not even an overlap between those skills. That's why companies employ graphic designers and not just developers.
Design is design. Those who can’t think about design fail at both code and IA / UX / UI, and often become quite rude out of frustration.
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its a lot easier to train people to code than it is to teach them good design.
Now, now, both jobs are equally redundant now we have thinking machines..
code is for people who can't design
yes i would agree. nothing wrong with either one of those things, but if we are talking about open source you can't be mad the coder sucks at designing.
Good design recognizes that the user is part of the functional chain.
Bad design forces the human brain to do a lot of the type of processing that it's bad at (eg arbitrary symbolic remapping).
Design is functionality
Even more reason not to add superfluous visual flourish.
Or putting `Installed apps` under `Settings`. Still not fixed after 15 years.
System app list is doing almost anything you need for installed apps, I don't think I needed the list in fdroid once in my life.
Surely useful if only to see the list of apps you can trust.
Hmm? what do you mean? installed apps are now available in "My Apps", 3rd button in the navigation bar after the update.
Are you talking about pre-2.0 versions?
Wait till you see how many taps it takes to access the equivalent list on the Play Store...
droidify is a much nicer looking frontend for f-droid
Was talking about syncthing-fork here to be clear, but I also agree
What are these people talking so much about another app. Are all these bots here now?
Calling 1.22x F-Droid 2.0 ... sigh.
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bc android users are less picky
All designers only use Mac+iOS. /s
There's so much worse out there. This at least looks functional and shouldn't hurt anyones' eyes.
Anyway, this is a FOSS project. Anyone could go and work with them to clean up the design.
But it's a fork, isn't it?
Yeah, even AI could tell this design is not really polished.
My problem with F-Droid has always been the lack of app reviews: no way to separate the good from the ugly and the bad.
Do you rely on Google Play reviews? Those are known to be highly manipulated and you can find any number of services offering to "boost" your reviews. I personally find online posts where people discuss about some app to have more meaningful feedback on it.
I use the Google Play reviews, and yes they can be manipulated but that is even less likely on F-Droid where there is less money involved.
I rarely look for positive reviews, these are often the ones that are manipulated. Negative reviews are usually more interesting, they can be fake too, but, marketing campaigns are usually more focused on promoting your own product than undermining your competitors.
You still need judgment, many negative reviews come from people who don't understand the app and where the problem comes from outside the app control. Common with apps that interface with hardware, for example, if you have a remote control app that makes use of a IR blaster, some people will complain that it doesn't work, but that's just because they don't have a IR blaster. But some are clear red flags like "wants me to create an account for not good reason", "intrusive ads", regular mentions of crashes or "since the last version..." comments which suggest enshittification.
Finally a submission at the top of the page that isnt about AI!
But the first comment I read is :'(
Hah, I had the exact same thought. Hacker News has become so exceedingly uninteresting recently
Shameless plug: I am the developer of Hack, available on both iOS and Android which has a toggle to block AI posts. Maybe you'd find it useful?
Eh, I bet the luddite boards were all loom talk at the end too.
haha, I kid. I... kid. :(
Cool! Unfortunately I switched to Obtanium a year or so ago. I get all my apps from GitHub releases straight from the developers now.
I use F-Droid precisely because I don't want that. When https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505229 happened - and when the same thing happens again in the future, because it will - I explicitly want F-Droid doing some basic due diligence on updates before shipping them to me. Cutting out the middleman is the opposite of what I want.
Counterpoint: I use NewPipe pretty much daily for watching YouTube. One day, YT introduced an API change that broke NewPipe, and so I patiently waited for an update.
A few days passed, and I eventually get a notification from NewPipe prompting for an update. But I can't install it just yet, because of mismatching signatures between the F-Droid and GitHub versions (yes, that's the point, I know...). The F-Droid build took so long to release, that in the meantime, another version of NewPipe came out...
This issue happens to some extent within liunux distros too. I think specifically for youtube maybe it would be beneficial for a single core library that deals with the API and is shared by every single project that cares to interface with youtube. Rather than dozens of projects trying to chase youtube changes and overburdening repository maintainers, there would only be a single library whose updates would be fast tracked. This also requires there to be no embedding it in anything too, I don't know how feasible this would be on android/f-droid, but it kinda already happens with yt-dlp in linux distros, but yt-dlp isn't a proper library nor does it deals with all youtube endpoints that a proper youtube frontend would require.
It would perhaps be nice if yt-dlp could eject it's youtube api handling into it's own project that is then augmented to handle anything youtube related and turns into THE library for dealing with youtube.. maybe even call it libyt :)
Have you added the NewPipe repo in F-Droid? I get updates this way pretty quickly.
https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
Notably, this is still cutting out the middleman and bypassing the extra review that that entails. It's fine as long as you trust everybody involved in publishing the repo, which is probably fine here, but a thing to keep in mind.
True. And especially for that use, I can imagine that the slow return around is actually a breaking problem. I think there are relatively few apps that need that kind of quick update, and I'm more concerned with malicious authors than that, but it would depend on precisely what you need out of your apps.
I ran into the same issue. The good news is that app is the only one I've had to uninstall and reinstall from an apk because fdroid was so insanely slow. I wish they made an effort to keep up with apps where they need to be updated frequently and stop working entirely if they aren't updated. I can't imagine there are too many apps like that
I've never actually had this issue, for whatever reason. In-app updates to NewPipe (and the various forks) install just fine even if I originally downloaded from F-Droid. Not sure how that works exactly.
F-Droid doesn't do any due dilligence on updates aside from blocking proprietary code
I literally linked a time when they intervened.
If you like the Obtanium user experience, I recommend you get involved and help them implement signature verification on F-Droid repos: https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium/issues/3348
I tried Obtainium a while back and didn't like it too much, finding apps seemed difficult.
Then I discovered https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ which makes it very easy. I feel like Obtainium should make this more obvious. It would help adoption a lot.
Fwiw, that link is documented in the readme at https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium so it's not hard for someone to find again. It's also prominent in the Obtainium app UI itself.
I know it is there in Obtainium, but I don't think it's prominent enough and it is easy to miss. I missed it my first time.
Do you use a lot of apps with that?
I tried it with 3 random apps for a while, but instantly got into issues. Two stopped updating due to Obtanium falling behind how app releases - for instance, developer changed version numbering scheme but Obtanium didn't expect that, so an outdated version was always presented. It wasn't fixed for quite a while.
I have 23 currently. It's surprising how fast it happened... I don't have any problems, but I don't pay much attention to it and apps seem to update automatically sometimes and after a manual refresh other times.
I've found Droid-ify more reliable at doing background updates, though it still only manages it sometimes (possibly due in some way to how I installed the apps). Hopefully Fdroid's app will be better at this.
Same for me. I typically search on F-Droid to find the apps and then add the github to Obtanium.
The update turnover is so fast for certain apps that I switched back to Fdroid.
Haven't yet used it, but I will say that's a great project name
What do you do for apps that don't have GitHub releases?
You can use APKUpdater instead, it supports APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub, I tried Obtainium and it was PITA to set up, I am much happier with APKUpdater for apps not covered by Aurora Store
https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ has plenty of apps that don't have F-Droid releases. Many of them come from the developers own website.
And if you see anything is missing, you can always add it!
The other way is to use fdroid as source within obtainium. The benefit is to maintain app list at one place, so you can export/import to another device, when needed.
You can use it with non-github releases too, but it's super rare when one isn't available. In the case when Obtanium doesn't work, I just use F-Droid.
Super rare? The government seems to release only on an obscure source called Play for some reason. I don't want to play a game, just to ride the transit system. There seem to be a lot of apps that don't release on such an addable source..
I think I’ve encountered 1 or 2 apps that didn’t work on Obtanium so YMMV.
Didnt know this! Thanks for sharing !!
Same, Obtanium is great.
I feel like f-droid is still very much a developer / advanced power user tool. I have not tried the 2.0 release candidate yet but with my version I get things like
> F-Droid: Repo timestamp expected 1790110069568, but was 1790205675224 IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repo: Repo timestamp expected 1790100093000, but was 1790272636000
The real problem I think is who should this message go to? My guess is we don't want to have mindless telemetry going from every single user to some central database or repository somewhere. My injection isn't even privacy here. It is that when we have lots of data coming from all over the world, I am afraid someone still has to sift through all this data and make sense of it but we can only understand and prioritize things we already know or are at least able to understand. I feel like this is pulling us in different directions — we want a simpler interface but we also want to expose all sorts of application states that require advanced understanding of how the system works. And someone needs to decide which bucket any particular message goes to — perhaps there is a more opaque but less frightening message like "sync had a hiccup, will retry" or even no message at all surfaces to the user unless it fails multiple consecutive times for the simple, default bucket and more verbose more frequent messages for those who want to see them?
But then even as I write this I can feel like this adds more maintenance headache, even as I push decision making to avoid having to think about a default, I still have to think about a default. The more I think about it, the less sure I am.
The new version is a lot more dumbed-down and end-user-friendly. (I didn't like it, personally, but I can imagine that more people in general will.)
I agree. The new version should be better for normal users which should help make F-droid more popular and maybe a real alternative to the Play store for people in general, not just power users.
What does the future of something like F-Droid look like once Google does their lock down next year?
Since F-Droid (i.e., the repositories, not the app) builds all apps, a practical solution would be for the repositories (i.e., their signing keys) to be recognized by El Goog. Whether and how much help / obstacle the "maybe we do evil" company puts up for / against this is a different question.
They have to use one key per app, otherwise independent app could end up sharing some permissions (IIRC).
The Emacs version for Android makes uses of something like this IIRC by signing a version of Termux with the same key and distributing it in the same SourceForge repo such that Emacs on Android can access CLI tooling like git for example.
It seems to me this is a blocker to use if google can restrict sideloading like this. Its not going to end with just get people requiring to register their app with an identity. Wont they be able to put presser on f-droid devs to lock out software they consider a threat to some business model?
> sideloading
That newspeak term should just disappeared. It only contributes to the image that downloading and installing an app is something that is outside the "happy path". Installing software of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be demonised
Fully agree. Installing software is installing software, signed or unsigned, app store or not.
Weird how different the mentality is from phones and computers. Or at least from what I remember when I used win 8.
Good point thanks for the clarification. I'll remember that moving forward.
Surely you see how installing unvetted software on a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc. probably shouldn't be part of the "happy path" for most people. You shouldn't even install software you haven't fully vetted from the google play store. This should be drilled into non-technical people.
Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.
> a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
I'd see it the other way around and say that a device running an operating system controlled by some company shouldn't hold your entire life, bank info, photos, etc.
How do you get around this? Literally every bank, brokerage, etc... is hell bent on you using your phone for everything from 2FA to passkeys, etc... They dont even imagine people have computers anymore or want two+ physical devices/controls on what can be done with which factors
It requires collective action. Ideally with laws to force interoperability, so folks can move among platforms with ease. Then standards will arise to keep that feasible for app makers.
Without regulation markets coalesce as the winners eat each other like a game of snake. It's a miracle Apple hasn't yet eliminated Android. Although I suppose for some institutions there is only iPhone.
Certainly you can use those, but they're not mandatory (here in Canada at least). Can easily get a card and use physical bank and ATM to do everything, and website logins use email as 2fa.
My bank tried to push an app, but I never installed it. I live in Germany.
> a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc
That device was called personal computer for decades, and the world didn't end for the simplicity of installing software on it.
The difference is that the only people who used those personal computers were (are) an educated subset of the middle class in developed countries.
No. Plenty of people with no technical knowledge.
Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.
Maybe with less brain cells burned by
I somehow forgot that last sentence there, apologies
That hasn't been true since September 1993.
It was true then and it is true now. Outside businesspeople and students and the middle class of OECD countries (all amounting to a low single-digit percentage of the world population), ordinary people never bought desktop or laptop computers. By contrast, everyone has a mobile one in their pocket today.
That's just false
More likely you're living in a bubble unrepresentative of the rest of the world. I just did some research, inconclusive because nobody is tracking this data. Personal-computer ownership in rich countries (i.e. "OECD") is indeed high. But only 12% of the world's population lives in Europe and North America combined. The figure is much much lower elsewhere in the world, where everyone lives. For example, 16 computers per 100 people in Brazil in the 2010s. [1] Most people in the world have never touched a laptop or desktop. Now that computing has gone mobile-first, the figure is only going to keep dropping.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/computers...
> That device was called personal computer
To be fair, mobile phones being locked down probably contributed to the mass adoption of e.g. mobile payments and banking.
Web banking was offered by all banks long before banking apps, and you could of course access it from smartphones
The move to apps made things more difficult, if anything
Offered but less broadly adopted. Having a platform that doesn't tend to get infected when used by normal users helped with that.
It was adopted by everyone I knew
And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
It's now that a lot of people can't use any remote banking, because their bank's app is huge or refuses to run on their phone.
> And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............
The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.
FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.
> The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use.
There are unconnected photoTAN devices that support this. They have a camera that reads a QR code. Some European banks use this. E.g. Vasco digipass 770
Yeah, compared to separate hardware HSMs mobile banking is a massive downgrade in both security as well as user being in control of the hardware they own (by forcing locked down closer source OS & forcing hardware updates).
If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.
The world may not of ended but to of people have been hurt by malware ruining their computer, cryptolocking all of their company's files for ransom, stealing all of your login credentials, stealing cryptocurrency, taking secret photos with your webcam, screen recording what you are doing on your computer, etc.
The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.
For many decades, people have been mistakenly putting diesel fuel into their gasoline cars, yet we never outlawed diesel vehicles. You can only do so much to protect people without destroying their rights to their property.
Society moved to having it so diesel fuel pump would not fit into gasoline cars.
Society didn't ban doing it, but put up barriers that help the average person from doing something dangerous.
The slight difference is that no one in their right mind would ever want to put diesel in a gasoline car
I think the pumps still fit where I live, btw
Rent or borrow a vehicle, and mistakenly fill it up according to habit. It's an easy mistake to make.
Making the nozzle shapes incompatible is a smart solution, but in the US at least I'm pretty sure they're interchangeable.
the pump handles are green tho
Many people are partially color blind, with IIRC most people having issues with properly seeing the green color.
Just like people get robbed, it is as common as that.
It doesn't mean one can't buy nice things because one is afraid of being robbed.
Except a sane society puts rules in place against robbers and then bans such people from society.
There have already been laws against scammers and hackers for a long time.
There are such laws already, what ragequittah was proposing (and Google implementing) is handcuffing people that are not robbers.
More like an alarm that deters (though not always) the robbers. You can still very easily sideload apps.
That seems to happen on phones too
It is much rarer since it needs 0 day to do these at the same level as possible on a pc. The play store scanning apps for malware is an important safety mechanism against this. Further more imposter apps like YouTube but with no ads that are Trojans that steal people's accounts.
Or the accessibility permission, or to some degree the access all files ones; but it's also enough for the app to pilfer the data you trust it with.
The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.
Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google
That means education for people: don't perform actions that are in emails.
Blocking apps is like blocking buying of knifes because one can hurt themselves.
Have you ever tried to educate a 70+ year old person on this kind of stuff? Their eyes gloss over and they don't care. I've told my mother not to install random apps on her phone several times yet she still does it. I could probably send her a phishing e-mail right now that 'looks like' it's from me (so long as my name is in the from: field that's enough) and she'd follow the instructions to install a malicious apk too.
"Everyone should just be smarter/more educated" is what I used to think as well. I now fully understand some people have no desire to be educated in any way and it's a net good for society to not have a large % of devices compromised.
It's full of malicious apps on google play. There are none on f-droid.
The logical conclusion is that fdroid should be allowed and google play banned by default.
The answer to people refusing to care about important things in life is not to put restrictions upon everyone's freedom. Ultimately, being an adult means you have to take responsibility for your actions (or lack thereof). It isn't hard to learn how to use a computer responsibly, and I've known plenty of older people who did so just fine. There's no excuse here.
You do understand we've broadly come to the conclusion that this isn't how society should work though, correct? It's why there's warning labels on everything, liability for not warning people for even the dumbest of things they might do with your product or in your establishment, extremely strict laws for things like driving a car, flying an airplane, or using any kind of heavy machinery, responsibility of servers to cut people off if they've had too much alcohol, the list goes on. I find intelligent people often have this mindset that all "real adults" are just as responsible as they are. It's just not the case.
And I generally wouldn't care "have at it" if their phone/computer being compromised only harmed them. But a bulk amount of compromised devices harms us all.
"Think of how stupid the average person is and then realize half of them are stupider than that!" -George Carlin
yes, got my father on linux a decade (or more) ago. He's 84. No problem. Most recently we discussed being vigilant against vishing.
Now my in-laws (similar age) one very demented, the other thinks he knows best because he was a chemical engineer...they could use some built in protections
so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
>so ultimately I think some default level of "guardrail" is appropriate, but it should have a not too burdensome escape hatch
Which is really exactly what google is implementing here and why I'm so perplexed so many people are upset. You or I or smart parents (my mother has never used a computer in her life and wouldn't want to) will have absolutely no issue sideloading apps after the proposed changes.
Given Google's track record, I don't think it's just "being upset" to have serious doubts about the probability of this escape hatch staying indefinitely.
But that's just a completely different discussion that we could've had a long time ago when they introduced it as a on/off security setting ~15-20 years ago too (and I bet people did). IMO nothing has changed except I bet more people will take going into developer options, being sternly warned, then having to wait 24 hours as a sign this is something maybe they shouldn't be doing. And I'd argue if you come to that conclusion and don't look into it further you're probably right,
Given that google is now forced to have competing app stores due to Epic v. Google and the ninth circuit courts went into long and arduous detail in that anti-trust case about sideloading restrictions I don't think they have a leg to stand on if they get rid of sideloading completely. Oddly Apple continues to get away with it no problem.
This description is downplaying what's changing by a lot. The way you present it, they're merely adding a 24h wait time to the existing local "unknown sources" toggle.
They've been chipping away at AOSP for years, pulling more and more parts of the Android experience into their proprietary Google Play Services. In this case, they're doubling down in the same direction. Sure, it may be more or less transparent from a user-facing perspective, but it's a fundamental change to the model.
Previously, it was ultimately a local decision: Android warned you, you enabled the permission, and you installed the APK. It now becomes dependent on a Google-controlled verification/authorization mechanism. That's fundamentally different from making the existing "unknown sources" toggle more annoying.
Google is the one peddling the malware. Any changes to 'security' that don't start with them removing the oodles of malware from their store are not security but profit driven.
It is like saying that you should not have free speech because someone might influence 70+ to say stupid stuff (well, that is already happening...).
Family should be responsible on education or making phone of people that are not educated enough (minors, elderly, etc.) limited - I do that using Family Link. I have there my child and also my in-laws - both of them can't install new apps without my permission.
So the tech is already there, one just needs to use it.
What about an entire family of people who have no interest in learning technology they just want the shady ad-free youtube on their phone? I find it perplexing you've never met people like this. I'd wager it's more common than not in our world.
There is no way to have no "shady ad-free" on Google play. Have you tried installing anything that is free? Games for example? There are ads every few minutes that you either wait or accidentally click on them and you install another approved google play app, that has similar ads.
Look at apps on fdroid, no such thing.
So the solution is simple - ban google play and allow only fdroid if one wants good apps.
You can't protect everyone. Just like there are people oblivious to bad eating habits - it is a tax on ignorance.
That would be like requiring people taking driving lessons before driving cars - what nonsense! Just let them behind the wheel & they will figure it out just fine!
Because education has worked so well on Windows.
There's not an easy answer, but the non-answer of "people just need to be educated" is trivially dismissed.
I'm not sure the situations are comparable when Windows doesn't have this permission system where the apps are still very limited in what they can access unless you grant specific directory access or access to the contact list or such
It does, but approximately nobody uses it, because Microsoft also tried to apply loads of constraints on what kinds of program could exist when they rolled it out, as part of their "all Windows software should also work on Windows Phone and Xbox" campaign.
Block installs outside of playstore ON/OFF (ON by default) isn't any less secure. "Sideloading" is scaremongering.
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If the issue Google has with sideloading is really just the rampant app piracy (and the malware that comes with cracked apps) that might be something F-Droid can accomodate.
I don't think malware is the problem, as most malware comes directly via Google's ecosystem carried by ads. Just recently I had to uninstall some app from the play store since it tried to distribute malware through scary pop-ups and had it replaced with something from f-droid for someone I know.
> most malware comes directly via Google's ecosystem carried by ads.
Google's own Play Store is filled with outright malware too, no ads needed. The idea that Google has to control what people are allowed to install on their phones isn't really for the protection of anyone except Google.
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It seems google is going to allow an "advanced flow" that is scam resistant by requiring the user to wait 24 hours before they can start installing their own apps. It sucks, but assuming they don't change the plan again, F-Droid should be able to continue working.
It's already live, I had to go through it last week. It's in developer options, then it asks if you're moving the selector to allow the installation of non-play store apps because you're being asked to by someone.
Then it starts a 24 hour timer. When that hits zero, you have 1 hour to go back in and select that you want to install apps on a device you own and paid money to own.
It's not scam-resistant at all. Any scammer will gladly work around this and send someone to one of many malicious apps in the play store, or a malicious URL, or even just set an appointment to call Grandma back the next day.
They're not necessarily wrong about it being scam resistant, based on some of the research into the psychology of scams. Adding time defuses the urgency of phone scams, leaving plenty of time to seek a second opinion from family members or the internet, and forcing the scammer to re-explain what the original goal was. It's too much time to breathe and defuses the fight or flight reaction needed for a high success rate. You mention URLs, but a web browser based scam page doesn't accomplish much, because the scammer's goal with fake apps is to acquire persistent remote access (akin to how the AnyDesk Android app uses accessibility permissions for Teamviewer-like remote access to an entire phone).
But yeah, it's hilarious that they're pushing this so hard when the Google Play Store still has so much malware.
Isn't this only an issue because they don't support fdroid?
Getting some 9-11 security theater vibes.
Yeah, a "hang up today, come back in tomorrow" scheme is perfectly viable.
What? It only stays enabled for exactly 1 hour after the 24 hour timer? I was under the impression that it would stay enabled permanently after waiting the 24 hours once.
IIRC, it's the button to permanently activate it that is only available for one hour. Once you do manage to press it, you've permanently enabled it. If you miss the window, you have to start the 24 hours again.
So basically Google is being now more of an asshole than Apple (that now allows app sideloading and third party stores, at least in the EU). I'm and Android user since the beginning and for once I'm start considering for the next phone that I could as well get an iPhone, basically all the good open stuff of Android is long gone (back in the days I used to flash a new ROM every week), and at least Apple is better in regards of privacy than Google.
Apple has been so bad to me, that it's really hard to imagine going back.
But dear... Google has no idea that they have/had the genuine nerds and are blowing it.
> assuming they don't change the plan again
Knowing Google, that's a big assumption
Alternative app stores are mandated atleast here in the EU I believe?
Yes but the process to enforce it is intentionally so difficult that nobody can do it.
Yes, but the ability to install any software isn't. goggle can still decide to allow only "official" apps in """3rd party""" stores.
The current lockdown plan is that you'll need to wait 24 hours before installing the first unauthorized app, right? So probably exactly the same as it is now except setting up a phone will take 24 hours longer.
It looks exactly the same as now. You will have to do Google's 24 hour flow thing, but it's not like that's going to stop anyone who appreciates what F-droid brings to the table.
Isn't it possible, however complicated, for users to undo the lockdown to install an app? The required 9 steps are noted at https://keepandroidopen.org/ for devices that use Google Play Services.
Irrespective, people should probably be migrating to a GrapheneOS or similar OS asap once the OS ships with a device.
Ah this is good to know. Awful it's required, but glad there is a work around.
Honestly not as bad as I feared it would be. Still not great and it's moving us farther from the idea that people who paid for the device should be allowed to install what they want on it, but as it stands it's a workable process. We'll see how quickly it takes Google to make it worse
no root on graphene, non starter
Switch to GrapheneOS or HarmonyOS
Currently, switching to GrapheneOS means giving Google money. Next year's Motorola-based alternative is also likely going to be several price classes above the Pixels you can currently put GrapheneOS on.
Then buy a Pixel second-hand or when they hit rock-bottom prices, which usually happens after 6 months or so. At some point Google is probably not making a lot of profit from the devices anymore and they want to sell it to you for tracking and to sell Google One subscriptions, which are mostly irrelevant if you use GrapheneOS.
I followed Pixel prices for the last year, and rock-bottom for a 256gb version (the current absolute minimum for a device without an sd, to my eyes) meant 450€.
There are occasional good deals for (unused) older models on eBay, but they're surprisingly rare.
I wonder if Google demands stores to give the old models back, after the release of newer ones; they disappear from every store extremely quickly.
Interesting, here you can still buy the P10 and P10P for hundreds of Euros off and the prices are still trending down. Also many stores still have them. This is not surprising, because Google still sells them themselves, just in fewer colors and storage tiers.
Yeah, the 10 are still sold, but hundreds off, so at what price they're sold?
I don't want to pay more than $150 for a phone, though. And installing an alternate OS is a real hassle.
If the current $500 pixels are too expensive you're going to hate the $1000 motorolas.
Stretching that budget to about $350 would get you a new Pixel a-series, on sale. It's well worth it.
I've tried $1000 phones before and found that they don't do anything different than my cheap phone, other than taking better quality pictures. But at least my cheap phone has an SD card slot and a headphone jack.
Not really, GrapheneOS has a nice web installer that makes all the job for the user.
you can get a pixel 7 good condition for that
There's zero reason to buy a last year phone.
The latest pixels are a complete downgrade from the previous year (worse components). That's one huge reason to buy a last year phone (as opposed to a current one).
Updates on this have been slowly trickling out and the best I can discern is you will be able to still install apps from stores like F-Droid, but you have to go through a manual "advanced flow" which will most likely make you wait 24 hours before installing it and make you go through other hoops.
In short, google has referred to this as "increased user friction" to try and deter people from doing this. Essentially not making it impossible; just really frustrating for users so they get sick of the process and just install verified apps through them.
The only way I know around this is to install a custom rom like GrapheneOS or Lineage OS since this change targets Because the policy targets the Google Mobile Services (GMS) framework rather than the foundational Android Open Source Project (AOSP).
Wait, it's not 24 hours per app though, is it? Isn't it 24 hours before the "allow installing apps from .apks" setting turns on once and for all?
Yes, you toggle it once and that's it. It also moves with backups so new devices don't need that step.
If I'm a developer I also need to wait 24hrs to test my app?
Pushing it with ADB isn't subject to the limitation: Will Android Debug Bridge (ADB) install work without registration? https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/...
So you will think really hard about what you're doing instead of just hoping :D
It sounds like moving software devs closer to people doing hardware, they have to wait for their changes a bit longer.
when you use adb - no need to wait for 24hours. Just use android studio or adb install
Pretty bright. So long as you can wait at least 24 hours from making yourself a developer.
Users and maintained packages would probably go down due to less users being able to use it, but users of Android (see GrapheneOS, LineageOS) without Google's Rookit can and will still continue to use it.
There is an entire world of Android phones not controlled by Google, including GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and countless variations in China and other places where Google is effectively banned.
Google getting sued again and losing again and drag their feet to unlock it again while devising a new way to go against the court order again.
This is among my greatest fears of android.
Not that Apple is better, but they lose a huge selling point.
From an Android developer perspective, not good. All apps on f-droid will have to be certified by the developer with Google (it's per-app I checked) otherwise they won't work at all. And the process of not easy, even for a verified play store developer, I still have to jump through hoops to register.
Then you have to explain to users how to enable this. Not too mention the onerous F-droid requirements for publishing, it's bad enough as it is.
Average users are not going to do this, just like Google wants. Hopefully someone sues them and wins or we get Linux phones, not holding my breath though
Very cool, the visual redesign was very much needed and I had been using Droid-ify for a while because of this. I'll switch back to the official app, congrats to the contributors!
I've just recently started to use F-Droid and discovered a lot of nice tools without ads and bloatware. Some of my favorites are Breeze, a weather forecast app, and Seal, a facade for yt-downloader that allows me to break the walls of social networks.
What are you favorite gems in F-Droid?
CoMaps for mapping and navigation: https://f-droid.org/packages/app.comaps.fdroid/
Standard Notes for sync'd notetaking: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.standardnotes/
Fossify Suite
Markor for notes.
The official page still downloads 1.23.2. I wonder when this will go live, and if the old app will auto-update.
Try F-Droid basic, it has this for a few weeks.
Right yeah, I saw this announcement, opened my Fdroid app and clicked around very confused on how to get it to update :S
Here's the link someone shared in reddit
https://f-droid.org/repo/org.fdroid.fdroid_2000050.apk
Same! At the bottom I saw 2.0 was available but 1.23.2 was still marker as "suggested". I had to manually expand 2.0 and install it
I think F-Droid is a great way to discover apps, but I'm not sure I would trust a binary downloaded from its repository the same I trust a binary downloaded from the app's official website or repository. I also remember a few apps clearly stating the F-Droid repo was a few versions behind and the "right" way was to install from their page.
Anyway, this might all become moot very soon if Google prevents us from installing anything from 3rd-party sources.
The builds are reproducible. Developers can also choose to fetch binaries directly from their repositories, and fdroid will verify that those binaries match the sources. So this is actually safer than downloading directly from developer's repo.
https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Reproducible_Builds
This is very good to see. Classic F-Droid always seemed to fail at updating repos at least every week or so.
Repo timestamp expected blah blah... toast coming out of nowhere is such a bad design. Really, the architecture in which you absolutely have to download the multi-MB index is as well.
Dear F-Droud, please stop redirecting me to the Mandarin version automatically without an option to read the original message. Just because I have a Chinese keyboard layout available.
What Accept-Language header are you sending?
Not sure, it happened on mobile Firefox. My point is that there should be a way to disable it and switch to a different language manually.
https://wutools.com/dev/testing-debugging/http-header-viewer
First hit for 'check http headers', in case that helps find out why websites think you want Chinese content. Maybe it's a bug in the website; maybe it's set as your first preference. Please report the bug if there is one!
And I'm actually stumped. Firefox is just sending `en-US` on mobile.
I have no idea why it selected Mandarin. I can switch back to English by using the "desktop site" feature that _does_ have a language dropdown.
That's strange, sounds worth reporting. They should be able to tell you if there's anything else to check (maybe some javascript interface says Chinese is the way to go) or if it's really just some strange bug on their end (misdetection of the ip address or so)
Amazing news! I mainly use the F-droid Basic version which does automatic updating of apps. The regular one needs user confirmation for updates if I remember correctly.
F-Droid and F-Droid Basic are the same code base, even more so with 2.0. So the automatic updating support is the same for both.
502 Bad Gateway
https://web.archive.org/web/20260924152713/https://f-droid.o...
The disguise is now icon-only, panic app-wiping is gone, and auto-updates are on by default, hmmm
For people who are die-hard F Droid users, do you get all your apps from it? I have tried in the past but it seemed like even when I restricted my use to basics it was missing things I needed to make my phone feel useful. Wonder if it has gotten better.
Most of them, yeah. My main non-F-Droid apps are YT-Music, Google Maps, Duo auth, Bible, and my bank app. Firefox, podcasts, local music player, ebook reader, RSS reader, email client, Matrix client, XMPP client, audiobook player, calendar sync, KeePassDX, SyncThing, Nix terminal, etc are all F-Droid.
Yes, essentially. I do have the Guardian Project repository and I get a handful of applications from the Play Store (via Aurora Store), but everything else comes from F-Droid. If you want even more, you can add the IzzyOnDroid repository[0], but bear in mind that unlike F-Droid, applications are built by developers themselves, and the rules on FOSS-only licensing are less strict.
[0]: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/
Less strict in some ways, more strict in other ways. Izzy hates vibecoded apps. Ironically F-Droid official seems more tolerant
does Aurora still work? Last few times I tried, I couldn't install anything.
It works. I see updates from just 3 hours ago, and generally updates have been pretty constant (I use Shizuku for auto-updates) though manual updates sometimes fail.
It has gotten better if anything. I used to have much more problems with it before.
It did yesterday, for me. Sometimes it doesn't work for a while and the dev needs some time catching up to what Google deliberately or inadvertently or indifferently put in the way of access to the place where apps are published (and they are published there, not because app creators deliberately chose Google out of many app distributors in some healthy competitive market; there is no choice).
The Aurora project accepts donations, if you want to hurry things along some time! And they have a donation button right there in the app listing, try doing that for yourapp in the PlayStore and see who comes knocking in 3...2..1 to make you a non-person.
Last used yesterday found no problem to install random application.
What do you find is missing? The main apps I need Google Play for are apps that are tied to a specific company or government service (eg, banking apps, or HMRC). For pretty much all basic functions I think F-Droid does the job.
Store and restaurant apps, discord, streaming apps, most games, payment apps, apps for school, ride-sharing. I tried the "degoogle" way and tossed after two days because that's impossible unless you're willing to adopt a more expensive boomer/millennial lifestyle.
Aside from payment apps, you can (and probably should) just use the web browser for most of those things
I have a slow, crappy tablet I bought on Temu.
It is not my main device, nor even my secondary device. It’s basically just a device I bought for cheap hoping that maybe I was lucky and it was actually pretty snappy. It’s not snappy :(
I occasionally watch a couple of YouTube videos on it and read a couple of HN posts on it, when my phone is out of battery or when I’m doing a backup of my phone and have left the phone on the table for that.
Anyway, aside from YouTube the other apps I have installed on it myself are all from F-Droid, including the DuckDuckGo browser that I use on it. I also have Signal on it, which I don’t remember if I installed from F-Droid or from Google Play.
My main device that I actually use a lot is an iPhone. And like I said I basically only use the tablet like a couple of hours a week and only to watch a couple of YouTube videos and read a couple HN threads, when I am not able to use my phone for those things.
Fossify Clock has the best accidental feature: when your alarm is going off, there's no way to stop it except for unlocking your phone, opening the app, finding the current alarm in the list of alarms, and disabling it.
This means you're definitely awake.
I'm being sarcastic.
I only use it to install the apps that aren't available on the Play store (e.g. Öffi, an excellent public transit app that gave up on dealing with the Play store after one too many arbitrary removals, Termux, and NewPipe).
The user experience was just too broken for too long to consider it usable (didn't support background updates for about two years after Google made it available, and generally just too much jank and random errors/failures). I might look into it the next time I'm setting up a device, but I think for the majority of apps I'll still go through the Play store - I don't trust F-Droid to be stable/reliable enough yet.
No I have Obtainium side by side with F-Droid. There are some closed source apps or apps that are not published on F-Droid (like Wireguard) that unfortunately I need. Obtainium is great for that.
What features does the wireguard app have that alternatives like WG Tunnel or KabelWacht lack?
I didn't know those apps existed.
I do, but then there is aurora store on f-droid for the gplay only apps.
Note it doesn't work very well, and Graphene recommends using Graphene's sandboxed Play Store instead.
Aurora works fine for me, and Google's software needn't chug along in a background sandbox no matter if all it can do is install apps, ping back to the mothership what your IP address currently is, and act as a proxy for other apps whose direct internet access you try to deny
No... I use a combination of Aurora, Obtainium and F-Droid.
Unfortunately there are APP providers actively preventing their apps to work on graphene OS, so i own an extra use@home cheap broken glass iphone for these mandatory but non-graphene apps.
It is a pain and it is getting worse... I'm really tempted to get back to the Apple ecosystem for less shens but currently i cannot do this yet... It just feels wrong but the pain is real. I'm Lösung the fight of investing too mich of my time in things that just should work.
just so you know you could replace Obtainium and F-Droid with APKUpdater which covers both sources and even more, I am using it alongside Aurora
https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
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I use droid-ify as frontend; and it's been fine to use f-droid repos for most of my needs. I try to install my apps from there in general. Biggest issue for me is android auto capability usually requires the app to be installed from play store (CoMaps) and my music player app (GoneMAD) has a companion unlocker that is from paid app store.
I need banking and bunch of vendor related apps. I need play store for them; so not full on f-droid repos. But close-ish when it comes to phone functionality.
When I need some category of app - say a note app or an audiobook player - I generally check F-Droid first.
If there's a good enough app on there, I generally stick with that as opposed to trying what Google Play has to offer.
I like having that prefiltering, knowing that the app will be open source, not trying to pull anything shady and not have ads or sell my data. On the Play Store, more often than not, at least one of those is not true.
Similar experience for me. I find f-droid a great supplement store but cutting out the default store entirely has felt like more of a commitment than I'm interested in so far.
I wouldn't use F-Droid exclusively. Many apps can simply be downloaded from their respective webpages. GrapheneOS also has also its own very basic app store.
FDroid offers the guarantee that the apk was built from source, and at least some marginal safety in terms of having passed their security and analytics/ads checkers.
You lose all that if you go directly to source.
Obtainium makes it easy to download apps directly from their webpages. Many of them have ready configurations you can simply add: https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/
With F-Droid (at least the main repo) you get extra guarantees that the apk is built by them. A thirdparty store also updates your apps, so you're not stuck at an old outdated version. I do use both F-Droid and Obtainium though.
Great! But why hasn't 2.0 installed automatically on all devices that already have F-Droid?
- go to F-Droid -> Updates. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- refresh the repositories. "Congratulations! Your apps are up to date."
- search directly for f-droid in apps. "This app was built for an older version of Android and cannot be updated automatically."
*facepalm* never change, F-Droid. You might not be able to automatically update the app because of Android API restrictions, but there's no reason your app can't tell me it knows there's an updated version I could be asked to apply manually, is there?
EDIT: it still says version 1.23.2 is "Suggested" even when 2.0 is installed. Perhaps this is a reason? Nonetheless, there's no setting to choose a different version policy, i.e. install 2.0 because it's newer, even if not "Suggested"
What does "Suggested" even mean? According to https://forum.f-droid.org/t/how-does-f-droid-suggest-a-versi... it's set manually by the person maintaining the metadata, which makes it even more of a facepalm if F-Droid are announcing 2.0 on their homepage but nobody set CurrenVersion=2.0 in their own metadata.
The beauty of open source is that you can build your own version of F-Droid that works the way you want. See https://github.com/f-droid/fdroidclient
According to the post they only start to roll this out now, gradually...
> Categories play an important role in helping users browse the repository, so we’ve expanded and refined them significantly
Are people actively using F-Droid categories to find new apps? I don't think I know anyone who does, and I've only ever used the search functionality.
i have occasionally browsed. but the experience is not very pleasant.. droidify is a bit better but also not much
Yes, games
Where can I actually download the F-Droid 2.0 APK ? Their page directs me to the old version & the old version does not look like it wants to update itself to 2.0... :P
I haven't used F-Droid since the age of Copperhead when I had an Android phone sitting around for testing purposes only. I never thought it would catch a wave like it has, but I also wasn't really thinking about geopolitical upheaval (not often or entirely seriously anyway) or tech companies angering (this much) everyone, but it is nice to see.
I never got around to trying the Copperhead successor in Graphene.
The relevant part might be “Android offers all app stores an option for a smoother and more automatic install and update experience than before. F-Droid 2.0 includes groundbreaking work on utilizing these new abilities. This allows F-Droid to use a unified installer for all F-Droid installs”. Giving it the proper App Store feeling.
Search not being a stupid floating button that occasionally disappears anymore is a huge improvement. Especially as it's the most important button.
> Also, F-Droid Privileged Extension (FPE) is not currently supported by 2.0. That means even if FPE is installed, F-Droid 2.0 won’t use it. This overhaul focused on full featured support for the Android “session” installer. That lets F-Droid run background updates on any recent Android version without requiring FPE. Like with any of the changes here, we welcome feedback.
This is a shame. Is the privileged extension a large maintenance burden?
When Google added the "session" installer to AOSP, we thought it would replace F-Droid Privileged Extension (FPE). So we stopped development on it. The answer now is that the "session" installer mostly replaces FPE, but not fully. So we're exploring reviving development: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/privileged-extension/-/work_items/...
Thanks, hopefully this goes somewhere!
I wonder how they got access to the ordinarily Google-locked "session" installer. Did Google open it up because of EU rules? I doubt it.
The support for that was added to Android 14 in 2023: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/14/features#req...
F-Droid took until now to use those APIs.
Are you stuck on an older android version?
No, but the issue linked by eighthave sums up my thoughts about the session installer nicely:
> Android provides two APIs for installing apps: a “privileged” API for things built in, and a “session” API for third-party apps. The built-in API provides key UX improvements, but is quite restricted due to the security architecture. The third-party API is not used by Google at all, and therefore it is buggy and receives sub-par maintenance. Also, Google is motivated to keep it lower quality since all apps that use it are inherently competitors to Google Play. The additional system prompts and potential instability owing to frequent changes in Google’s SDK requirements may frustrate users, particularly those who are not tech-savvy.
Other things not mentioned:
- updating applications with adb or the package installer (e.g. by downloading and opening the APK) seems to force F-Droid to show the dialog again
- applications are not eligible if their minimum API version is too low, meaning you get a prompt on every update
All in all I see no reason to put up with subpar installation UX just because Google doesn't endorse the store I use.
not the person you replied to, but i'm staying on Android 8 and 11 as long as i can.
How much are you willing to fork?
You are heard. But what's your point?
1. Nice! :-)
2. Please donate a few EUR/bucks to F-Droid! It's a good place to get Android apps from, and we can't all just mooch off of it. Doesn't have to be a big donation.
3. I am worried that Alpahbet/Google will kill these "unauthorized" apps soon, so that the new version arriving would be kind of bittersweet. Although - maybe I'll just need to switch to LineageOS or something.
Is it not available yet? Fdroid doesn't update, and downloading and re installing leaves me with the usual app.
Still, excited for when it'll be ready.
That page uses the term ''repository''' singular. Can additional repos be added in the way Neo Store allows?
Yes. F-droid allows that, you can have multiple repositories and ... a few of those even exist :)
I'm using that with 2.0 (or rather with F-droid Basic, but I noticed Basic was updated to the same that is described in article, but a while ago). It works just fine.
It's always been possible on F-Droid, I doubt they would change something like that.
Yes, that's how you can install an manage Molly (the open source Signal replacement). They run their own F-droid repo.
Of course. Don't even need F-Droid 2.0 for it. Fdroid 1 still supports multiple repos
I hope the new redesign makes the store easier to navigate on TVs. It's a nightmare trying to install/update apps on F-Droid on either my Nvidia Shield Pro or my Onn 4K TV using the tv remote. The cursor gets lost all the time and it's often impossible to see what option is currently in focus when you click Ok on the remote.
Have you filed a bug? That's niche enough that i wouldn't necessarily expect the devs to have tested such scenarios.
I just hook up one of those mini Rii keyboards for navigating phone-centric apps on Android TV, but better remote support would be nice as well.
I just downloaded neostore yesterday because I kept on downloading garbo from fdroid because I had no way of seeing which apps were downloaded a lot (which isn't perfect but pretty good test for the quality of lets say a local music player).
Good on fdroid. Will be removing neostore and going back to fdroid.
Since this made into HN first page, I've been trying to find the APK of this version 2.0...
Am I missing something stupid?
e: my bad, was on desktop and didn't actually try it on my phone (I use Droid-ify anyway)
Thank you, but this APK is not the v2.0.
Ok now the 2.0 appears in the F-Droid page on F-Droid itself.
mhm, that's just loading v1 for me
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1. Where is the date for articles on this wiki
And still no popularity rating, download count or any user review system whatsoever.
Can't you at least see and file issues and discussions on the respective app's code repo site? This is often although not always sufficient, as the repo owner can censor issues and discussions.
Google has for years censored app reviews anyway on its Play Store, and also allowed too many low-value reviews which drown out useful reviews.
Except the 2.0 does have a most popular apps section.
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Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
The answer to freedom isn't another marketplace. It's legislation that requires Google and Apple to allow web installs without scare walls or deeply hidden permission toggles.
You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
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Edit because of rate limits:
This is not derogatory. This is making the point that the wrong battle is being fought. F-droid fans are cheering a small victory, yet losing the entire war.
F-droid does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's not the point. The point is the app store monopoly. That there are only two platforms and that both are almost completely locked down.
F-droid users don't even see that Google is purposefully allowing this as an antitrust sponge in their calculus. Google doesn't mind because 0.0001% of their users will install this. If they had a sense that the regulators wouldn't bother them, they'd just as well close this loophole. And they probably will eventually.
This isn't beachhead, and even if it was, it isn't sound footing or a stable foundation. It can easily go away.
> Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
This seems weirdly derogatory towards people that use F-Droid.
As an F-Droid user for idk how many years now, I'd say it's spot on!
Really? I don't understand
> put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
at all. I feel like I install apps from the store, and use them. So I'm confused by both "hours of time" and "altruism".
I must admit I skimmed the altruism part and only absorbed the nerd part. You are correct.
> Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
What? I'm not sure how you would manage to waste hours installing a single app and then using it to install other apps, and I'm not using it because of "altruism" (what does that even mean?), I'm using it because it's the best way to get apps.
> You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
> There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
Even if you 100% trust Android's sandboxing and permissions, which is... not a choice I would personally make, I like it when my apps don't have scams or ads internally, either. I'm not worried about Grandma downloading any app off F-Droid; I am a little concerned about what happens if she can download any app being pushed by any random website.
I don't use F-Droid often, so maybe my take isn't worth much. But when I opened the new version, I found myself a bit lost. Maybe I just need more time to get used to it.
Great visual and usability update.
Even greater HN conversation about all the to-me-unknown alternatives. I used neostore as a replacement, but maybe time to try f-Droid again
This pushes me more and more to buy a Raspberry PI5 so as to enjoy a de-Googled Android experience.
Some of the apps are really good.
I wish they would add ratings or even just comments
Just highlighting that Zapstore is also a nice alternative here with better ux and social web of trust app validation.
Finally, F-Droid 2.0! Hope the new repo management is smoother; that's always been a pain point.
Curious if they've improved repository sync speed. The old one felt like molasses sometimes.
Tangential...
One of the reasons I went with Android over an iPhone. If F-Droid stops working I am done with Android.
it's beyond me why someone who uses F-Droid would consider an phone from Apple
Urgh such a shame to be written by LLM
I wonder if FDroid has a policy against LLM? i was reading one of the MR here https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/merge_requests/1729 and they seem to gate on LLM contributions (and vibe coded android app)?
In summary of this MR: no, they do not ban AI
lol @ 'ai;dr' to a 2 line PR, anti-ai people really are just bullies now
Not any super user but about three/four months, I'm using my device without any google account. Also not using any G service apps such as mail/yt/maps and of course play store. Instead of play store I found aurora store very helpful. "Very" because of the anonymous login future. But sometimes the store disturbs. Newly added apps on Play store doesn't appears on aurora. Also many applications fails to be installed without showing any reason. Some shitty apps redirect to the play store app (which I'm unable to disable but uninstalled her! Updates) and just doesn't works anything more then redirecting me. So I'm still not a fan of Aurora. But it's going not bad. But sometimes I should browse other sites to get old/delated from Play store apps. Also for mod/adless version of some apps.
I heard of fdriod but what I think it may only serves feature less, low UI/UX optimized apps. So didn't installed it yet. But something should be available where people can find all Play store apps (as aurora supplies) + premium/adsense deleted modified apps (random website) + Open source apps (fdroid)…… this will make android insane
Fitting, as there really are only 2.0 trustworthy app stores for Android.
Love it new design fdroid basic really smooth in my ancient phone.
If only they improve the AndroidTV experience a bit
At least it's functional, unlike in 1.x builds. I'm happy with it. But better support is always appreciated, of course
We need a non-android libre phone
Why would that be better than my GrapheneOS phone?
so nice. FDroid always looked a bit dated to me
It's nice to see F-Droid going places.
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Can I finally block those bible apps?
Did they implement any GrapheneOS security complaints for it to be deemed actually secure?
GrapheneOS security complaints about F-Droid are a load of nonsense except for one: the APK on the website is signed by a different key from the one that F-Droid updates itself with.
> the APK on the website is signed by a different key from the one that F-Droid updates itself with
Could you explain? I don't understand what you mean here. https://f-droid.org/F-Droid.apk is signed by the same key that signs https://f-droid.org/repo/entry.jar
> All new code in this effort uses modern Android code standards and designs. This gives us a codebase that is easier to maintain, test, and easier to extend with new features in the future.
No, this increases the overall complexity of the system. Android will hopefully eventually collapse under its own weight.
Once GrapheneOS ships on devices, it and Samsung can in time pick up where Android stops.
"F-Droid 2.0 now fetches and installs app updates by default."
Why not download source, review, (edit) and compile on the device, e.g., using Termux, Gradle and Android cmdline-tools
Is "convenience" the rationale for the F-Droid app
Maybe it's the same rationale that drives Linux users toward "binary package managers"
Running a malicious build script is just as bad as running a malicious app, so I don´t see why you want that? Also F-droid has fully reproducible builds, so you can be sure you'll get the same binary.
Speed. Most people are going to choose a fast binary download + automated integrity check over compiling from source, regardless of their reason for using F-Droid.