F-Droid

Happy new alpha!

Posted on Jan 02, 2025 by linsui

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 02 Jan 2025, Week 1

F-Droid core

We wish you a Happy New Year! and we bring the new F-Droid and F-Droid Basic 1.22.0-alpha0, which marks the start of another dev testing cycle.

What’s new? More polishing, bug fixing and pain points addressed:

  • use “gentle update” API so apps don’t get killed while in use
  • experimental support for un-archiving apps on Android 15
  • separate share link and share file actions in app details (so you can share the link to the app page or the installed APK)
  • clean internal caches more often to free up space (Thanks DerGenaue!)
  • don’t update repos if they already have been updated in last 15sec
  • re-order donation badges to match website (Thanks Leo!)
  • show toast when APK has more permissions than expected (if your Android distro injects extra permissions, you’ll know)
  • add settings toggle to prefer foreign mirrors
  • verify hash of downloaded image resources and reject invalid ones
  • don’t show apps with “bad” anti-features in category view
  • don’t show error dialog for (un)installs when user actively aborted
  • don’t update repos twice on fresh/clean app start
  • auto fallback to other installer if priv-ext doesn’t have permissions
  • reduce DB size by checkpointing more frequently (Thanks DerGenaue!)
  • fix a crash when a repo removed

As usual we ask brave users to test this release and offer feedback as soon as possible. For example, “use ‘gentle update’ API so apps don’t get killed while in use” needs some attention, keep an eye on interactions with apps that keep a foreground service active, say like your email client or your messaging app, do they autoupdate as expected?

How to install this new alpha? In F-Droid Client, on its own page, either scroll down, expand Versions and install the latest, or in the upper right menu choose “Allow Beta updates”.

Community News

@codedoctor is a bit late here but wanted us to know that Linwood Butterfly 2.2.3 was released. It sounds like a small release but it’s one of the biggest quality of life updates.

Highlights:

🎨 More interface customization
💾 Save button indicator for autosave
🖊️ Laser tool improvements
📝 Template dialog improvements
🎨 Color wheel
🖼️ Render resolution

Full blog entry here.

Tailscale was updated to 1.78.1-t8903926f7-gfdc1e9ca4 after more than 2 months, as version 1.72.0 had some issues that we mentioned in TWIF 2024 week 43. Another good news is that the app might be swichable to build reproducible soon, if upstream agrees.

Newly Added Apps

3 apps were newly added
  • Al-Azkar: Imam Al-Hafiz Yahya bin Sharafah Al-Din Al-Nawawi
  • Flip 2 DND: Toggle Do Not Disturb mode by flipping your phone face down
  • SimbaDroid: A simple SMB file server (needs root)

Updated Apps

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

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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