F-Droid

Bike-shedding is over

Posted on Apr 10, 2025 by Licaon_Kter

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 10 Apr 2025, Week 15

F-Droid core

F-Droid and F-Droid Basic were updated to 1.23.0-alpha0 starting the testing phase for that one feature users will actually notice, an UI refresh. This was work-in-progress for the last year thanks to the efforts of @proletarius101 who drafted the bulk of the changes. As usual when it comes to design, things might get polished and touched, but to be frank, most of the team felt this was ready a while ago and we wanted you to test it and enjoy it faster. We challenge you to find 5 differences between the update today and our February sneak-peek!

The full changelog:

  • Material Design 3 (with edge-to-edge, but without dynamic colors) (Thanks proletarius!)
  • redesign repository details screens (Thanks Thore!)
  • added logcat file export in expert settings (Needed by the team for debugging, finally users don’t need adbs or PCs when reporting issues!)
  • update target SDK (Android 15 for Basic and Android 11 for full)
  • add backlink from app’s page in system settings (Thanks j-m4)
  • wording improvements (Thanks Lucas!)
  • bug fixes related to deleting repositories (Thanks Matthew and Thore!)
  • use app chooser for sharing installed apps and install history (Thanks Thore!)
  • do not show “download failed” toast if download was canceled manually (Thanks Tobias!)

As usual we ask brave users to test this release and offer feedback as soon as possible. How to install this release? 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

While the Divested project is no longer alive, we thank @Tavi for keeping the F-Droid.org Stats page available and updated.

In other Divested news, GMaps WV was updated to 3.8, first version under its new developer.

Talking about stats, @moneytoo, the dev of Just (Video) Player which was also updated to 0.190, dropped by to share their own stats project: Awesome F-Droid Apps. The tables cover apps from F-Droid, F-Droid Archive and IzzyOnDroid repos. Full source code available here.

A note about the way numbers are crunched: “Weekly average might be skewed by the number of app updates and swarms of users updating previous installations. So my take is to get the average downloads per app version. I’m hoping this would tell about an app user base and popularity. (To get proper numbers I also have to convert versionCode to versionName because of the per-arch release packages). Anyway, I also tried getting download counts from Google Play. Maybe around 20% of apps are there under matching package id. That’s not much but also it’s not nothing.”

And yes, Termux numbers are still an outlier and can be ignored.

But you should not ignore that Termux was updated to 0.119.0-beta.2 and stable 0.118.2 and proceed to bump the download stats.

G-Droid was updated to 0.20.0 after a three year break. It’s mostly a maintenance update, but we hope it gets more features soon.

As spoiled last week, Immich was updated to 1.131.1, and it makes maps nicer and the app faster. Full notes here.

Jami was updated to 20250331-01. The team has taken seriously the role of on-boarding Skype orphans, hence the new “Jami vs Skype: welcome to where your privacy matters” post which explains the strengths of its decentralized offering.

SmartScan, Organize images and enables text-based search, was just added. It offers the power of the buzzwordy AI to users by leveraging the “power of a CLIP model that automatically organizes your images by content similarity and enables text-based search, making gallery management effortless”. All offline!

@linsui unblocks Wiki:

Wiki Unblocked was removed in July 2024 and now another anti-censorship Wikipedia client was added. Unlike Wiki Unblocked which relies on proxies, the new Wiki Fronted uses domain fronting technology to bypass Deep packet inspection so no third-party server is required.

@shuvashish76 makes enterprisey chess moves:

For chess lovers, the new TacticMaster, Chess tactic trainer, works fully offline and it is based on lichess’s open database of puzzles under CC0 license. The database recently reached 5,000,000 puzzles milestone! Improve your chess skills offline without any distractions. 🙂

There’s no K9 or Thunderbird update this week, but the team at Mozilla just announced “Thundermail and Thunderbird Pro Services”: “All of these new services are (or soon will be) open source software under true open source licenses. It is our goal to eventually have a similar (such as Gmail and Office365) offering so that a 100% open source, freedom-respecting alternative ecosystem is available for those who want it. We don’t even care if you use our services with Thunderbird apps, go use them with any mail client. No lock-in, no restrictions – all open standards. That is freedom.”

We wish the team success!

Removed Apps

1 app was removed

OpenTrail, OSM-based England and Wales walking app, takes a break as the backend is not working for now.

Newly Added Apps

5 more apps were newly added

Updated Apps

170 more 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