F-Droid

There's no dummy cycle

Posted on Jul 24, 2025 by Licaon_Kter

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 24 Jul 2025, Week 30

F-Droid core

With the index fix behind us, we can think of the future. But a couple of users pinged us to ask “Y U don’t just run 2 dummy cycles to fix the bug then?” and the answer is “well, because of reasons, lol”.

First, the codebase does not support a so called “dummy” run. An index needs to be created from the repository metadata and its actual files (packages, screenshots, icons, etc). Reading our often linked “Why does it take so d**n long for my app to show up on website and client?” FAQ entry, we might have skipped the gritty little details of what is going on in between build, signing and publish. All those files need to be parsed (including the added categories backgrounds that fixed the issue) and hashed and neatly stored for the clients to pick up. While we’ve made strides in optimizing the needed operations, some still take hours. Lately, the monitor page of the current running cycle will even show each operation that fdroid update does and how long it takes.

Second, we didn’t actually wait two real cycles. We wanted the fix faster, so we forced the second cycle to build one single app and then stopped it. The server then continued, as written above.

Third, every time we stop a cycle, and we’ve rarely done this in the past for critical apps updates (think CVE level issues), all the apps that needed to be processed get pushed back. Your brand new included app? Will have to wait. That update that added that feature that you wanted? Next cycle. Fortunately apps that get archived will still be, but that’s no reason to throw a party.

The F-Droid build flow is in a work-in-progress modernization process, yet we are not ready for that in production. Until then, the build queue is, for historical reasons, “last in, first out (LIFO)” and reversed-alphabetical (talk about technical debt!). This means that, based on apps appId, it will build from zzz.yyy to aaa.bbb. When we stop a cycle the apps will stay and wait, then the next cycle will start and it will process all the apps changed on top of the queue in the mean time and after that it will process the apps that did not get built in the stopped cycle. This might not sound problematic, but our build frequency of a cycle every 4 days, on average, means that suddenly the are two times more apps to build than usual. This, coupled with a global build cycle safety timeout of 3 days, means that there’s not a chance but a certainty that some apps will not be built and will be one week late already.

“F-Droid is slow” is the meme. And while this might be applauded by users when it comes to making sure each app we include is truly FLOSS and that we catch and signal each anti-feature as found, this is no longer a favorite trait when it comes to building said apps.

Back to “the future” part, as linked, our work is targeting a flexible system that’s not cycle based but runs continuously and allows us to control what and when we publish, as operations can be run in parallel. We explained above, from the technical side, “why R we here” but you can always reach out to get your hands dirty or help support F-Droid, by checking out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Community News

Conversations and Quicksy were updated to 2.19.0+free. Much work has been done in the unseen internals, the famous 3.0 version that everyone expected years ago is taking over slowly, but some stuff you can explore too. The avatars could already be hidden, but now you can control them for both received and sent messages. Public channels admins/moderators can now delete messages, really useful for spam control. High resolutions avatars can be set and zoomed, but this depends on your server support (ping your admin!). For the few tablet users out there, the UI now defaults to left aligned bubbles with disabled colorful theme, making the app look desktop-ish. Recorded voice messages should no longer be getting truncated, do test if your device exhibited this before.

Jami was updated to 20250718-01. The team explores in two posts how they can make the app accessible to everyone and how development is ongoing.

SimpleX Chat was updated to 6.4 to overhaul the experience of connecting with people. The explainer post is a 20 mins read, but you’ll get the scoop on how app development works, specially for apps that want to offer a secure environment.

K-9 Mail and Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox were updated to 11.0 improving app navigation and more. The team has a post showing what’s new and you can peruse the full changelog.

Meanwhile Thunderbird Beta for Testers was updated to 12.0b1 with even more fixes and treats. Note: This beta will crash on startup if the left or right swipe gesture was set to ‘None’. This is fixed in Beta2.

@linsui announces us simple things:

AnySoftKeyboard was finally updated to 1.12.7138 after three and a half years of pause. All its languages were updated last week so you can finally enjoy the latest keyboard.

NASA APOD for Muzei was updated to 1.0.0. This app was un-maintained since 2019 and stopped working on recent Android versions. Recently @provokateurin picked it up and took over the official dev work from now on.

Back in December 2023 we announced that the beloved Simple Mobile Tools suite is no longer FOSS. In the meantime the community maintained Fossify suite has replaced each app, almost. Last remnants of the old suite were archived last week including a forked app called Simple Contacts Pro SE. What we’re still waiting for are the Flashlight and ThankYou apps, but in the mean time please review your installed apps (in Android Settings as F-Droid won’t show the old apps any more) and replace any orange themed one with the new green Fossify ones.

Newly Added Apps

8 apps were newly added

Updated Apps

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

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