F-Droid

ASK you shall receive

Posted on Jul 17, 2025 by paulali

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 18 Jul 2025, Week 29

F-Droid core

Last week’s TWIF title was not a joke, but it became a meme two days later, on Saturday morning, when the week suddenly was upgraded to “interesting”.

We reported on the removed categories backgrounds as just another adaptation based on years of feed-back and user experience, also tightening the focus on finer grained app filtering by better categorization. What we didn’t account for were edge cases in the old codebase as it evolved in time.

Since these backgrounds were integrated, their code handling was untouched. When we added the “diff index” improvements, so that only the changes since the last index are downloaded, we started to merge the older local index and the new small update index locally to recreate the full index.

On Saturday morning (UTC!) the first index without backgrounds was published, the information on them went from “categoryname.png” to nothing, or in the machine language to null. On your device, the database merge in the client was encountering a value that it was not expecting, and it errored out with not nullable: icon.

The team was, as usual, spread around the world, in so many different time zones, ranging from Saturday evening to Friday night, yet we figured out what the issue was, reverted the offending commit (the one that removed said backgrounds), and brainstormed (and tooted) ways for users to get out of this conundrum in a couple of hours.

When you read this, the index fix has already been deployed so users got updates again as usual. This took two cycles to deploy. Why two cycles? A build cycle started immediately after the faulty index update, as they do, and the fix was to be processed by the next cycle. Since we average an update every 4 days, other bugs aside and depending on the build queue, the fixed index was expected to go live in about 7 to 9 days, give or take. During this time users were affected by the mysterious “nullable” toast, but otherwise be okay.

Going forward, we got this fixed in the Client code and will be part of the next 1.23.1, soon, with other nice fixes. Once this version is out for a while, we will proceed with the backgrounds removal as we intended initially.

*UpstreamNonFree* was always a confusing and misleading AntiFeature. It’s used to flag the applications that are patched downstream by F-Droid to remove the non-free parts. All applications published in the F-Droid official repo are fully FOSS. However, users thought the flagged applications are somehow non-free while, in truth, many applications in F-Droid are patched more or less without getting this AntiFeature. After years of discussions, we decide to remove this AntiFeature.

Community News

@linsui is typing:

The AnySoftKeyboard is a multi-lingual keyboard. It supports many different languages via a huge set of plugins. Though it’s actively developed and updated, it hasn’t tag a new release since 2022. Therefore, the version published on F-Droid is far behind other distributions channels. Besides, many plugins were never published on F-Droid and some of them are archived during the migration from Google Code to GitHub. The complicate version system and the lack of upstream response also prevented us from updating it automatically. Since this keyboard is popular and many users are waiting for an update, I finally took some time to update it with all the plugins to the latest version and added 40+ missing plugins. Enjoy them!

We also did some cleanup, archiving some applications we had trouble to update to the latest versions, including Bliss Launcher which is still actively developed. If you are a user and want to update them, please help!

Removed Apps

20 apps were removed
  • Battle for Wesnoth: A turn-based strategy game with a high fantasy theme
  • Bliss Launcher: Launcher originally designed for /e/
  • Block6: Block6 is an SMS app that makes it easy to block messages from numbers you don’t
  • Clock You: Privacy focused clock app build with MD3
  • CryptoTerminal: Secure Point of Sale cryptocurrency payment terminal
  • Document Viewer: A highly customizable viewer for PDF, DjVu, XPS, cbz, fb2 for Android.
  • Euro konverter: Calculator for converting Croatian kunas into euros at a fixed exchange rate
  • GSMLocationNlpBackend: UnifiedNlp location provider (OpenCellID)
  • GTFSOffline: Use with any pro-GTFS transit agency
  • Kanji draw: Kanji recognition
  • KeepScore: User-friendly score keeper
  • NC Bookmark Viewer: This is a lightweight viewer for Nextcloud bookmarks
  • NoPhoneSpam: Block unwanted calls
  • PartyGames: Play popular PartyGames
  • S Tools+: Collection of system tools
  • Simple App Launcher: A customizable holder for your favorite apps, reorder icons as you wish.
  • Simple Dialer: Manage phone calls with this simple phone dialer app with phonebook
  • Simple SMS Messenger: SMS messaging and MMS messaging app for Android, send messages fast, nice UI
  • SoundWaves: Manage and listen to podcasts
  • Turbo Editor: Simple text editor

Newly Added Apps

47 apps were newly added
  • App Lock: Secure your sensitive apps with powerful biometric protection using AppLock!
  • Deskflow Android: A fully functional (90%) Deskflow client application for Android devices
  • MapComplete: Thematic, editable maps based on OpenStreetMap
  • TLSFragment: TLS fragmentation to bypass China’s Great Firewall.
  • Transport You: Privacy focused public transport app built with MD3
  • WHPH - Work Hard Play Hard: Productivity app for task management, habit tracking and time optimization

And many AnySoftKeyboard plugins:

Updated Apps

115 apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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

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

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

Find Apps

F-Droid is powered by your donations!

Connect

mastodon
@fdroidorg@floss.social

News