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

>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.

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?

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.

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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.

> 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..

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.

Like https://github.com/Hoverth/fdroidcl ? :)

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...

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.

[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.

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 run Calibre Content Server on a VM. So my ebook reading is just accessing that in the browser. Works great.

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.

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.

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.

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! :-)

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.

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.

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.

But it's a fork, isn't it?

Yeah, even AI could tell this design is not really polished.

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.

But the first comment I read is :'(

Hah, I had the exact same thought. Hacker News has become so exceedingly uninteresting recently

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 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.

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.

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.

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?

Didnt know this! Thanks for sharing !!

Same, Obtanium is great.

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.

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.

Alternative app stores are mandated atleast here in the EU I believe?

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.

Switch to GrapheneOS or HarmonyOS

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).

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

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.

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

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

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.

What Accept-Language header are you sending?

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.

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/

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.

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.

I do, but then there is aurora store on f-droid for the gplay only apps.

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.

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...

i have occasionally browsed. but the experience is not very pleasant.. droidify is a bit better but also not much

Yes, games

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/...

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.

Are you stuck on an older android version?

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

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.

e: my bad, was on desktop and didn't actually try it on my phone (I use Droid-ify anyway)

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.

it's beyond me why someone who uses F-Droid would consider an phone from Apple

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

At least it's functional, unlike in 1.x builds. I'm happy with it. But better support is always appreciated, of course

Why would that be better than my GrapheneOS phone?

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.

Once GrapheneOS ships on devices, it and Samsung can in time pick up where Android stops.

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.