Notices by F-Droid (fdroidorg@floss.social)

With 2024 now behind us, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the growth and achievements we accomplished as a community last year, and celebrate the incredible support we received from the FOSS community throughout the journey. #FDroid #yearinreview #2024inreview #foss #Android

https://f-droid.org/2025/01/21/a-look-back-at-2024-f-droids-progress-and-whats-coming-in-2025.html

This week in #FDroid (TWIF):

- We will remove the "gentle update" from F-Droid 1.22.0-alpha, as it is not stable enough. Thank you for testing (and finding bugs)!
- there is a new article on how to replace most common apps with open source versions
- Fossify Paint was added
- we recommend to switch from Mull to Fennec (as Mull has stopped development)
- OpenTracks is now available as reproducible and non-reproducible variant
- Exclave, a SagerNet fork was added

https://f-droid.org/2025/01/09/twif.html

@AAMfP @privacybrowser @monocles It's true that, given F-Droid's FOSS-only stance, we don't currently build any Chromium based browsers, as that codebase is not only huge but comes with plenty of random binaries. The two mentioned browsers depend on the system installed Webview so it's out of our hands. We just hope everybody gets timely Android and Webview updates.

This week in #FDroid (TWIF):

- Fennec (our Firefox fork) was updated to version 134. Mull however won't get this update, so it's time to switch browsers
- Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered was re-engineered
- RetroArch is now easier to onboard
- Syncthing was finally archived, but Syncthing-Fork got an update
- WG Tunnel is now reproducible, which unfortunately means a re-installation on your side
- Some more news about Wikipedia, Element and NClientV2

Read more at https://f-droid.org/2025/01/16/twif.html

@daniel We've covered the Divest end since December in our weekly https://f-droid.org/news posts. If you have Mull from our repo you already got a warning in updates. Try Fennec.

@De_Treias Mull has stopped development. Fennec 134 is already updated and available.

We got a report of a bug in our certificate pinning code. We confirm that this bug exists and currently does not affect f-droid.org. This bug can only be exploited when an upstream project is compromised first, and only new installations will be affected. Therefore, we consider this bug of low urgency. We're looking into the reporter's patches + thank them for their work.

@cadusilva Since F-Droid 1.19 on Android 12+ there's no need for the Privileged Extension for autoupdates, the app can do it itself.

@daltux@ayom.media @daltux@blog.ayom.media RustDesk is in the main F-Droid repo, fyi. Also note that Mull has been discontinued, you could for example switch to Fennec.

We're starting a sprint to look at all the issues preventing #ReproducibleBuilds in all the apps we ship. Most of the issues are simple fixes in the upstream code, like unsorted outputs or timestamps included in the build.
You can help make the #FreeSoftware #Android ecosystem be more reproducible! See the failures here and help us report them upstream: https://verification.f-droid.org/failed.html

After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, there is still Giving Tuesday left.

But instead of shopping stuff you probably don't even need, please think about, if you want to give something instead.

Let it be a donation [1] or a contribution [2], every bit brings us forward (all together).

We wrote a bit about possible reasons to give:
https://f-droid.org/2024/12/03/giving-tuesday.html

[1] https://f-droid.org/donate/
[2] https://f-droid.org/contribute/

This week in #FDroid (TWIF):

- european-alternatives.eu lists software and apps that come from the EU, some of them are regular guests in our TWIF
- we found a YouTube video about apps that are NOT on a centralized app store
- aTox and UniPatcher were updated again after a long hiatus
- Kodi fixed many bugs
- OsmAnd~ has a lot of new features
- Status, VLC and Zulip were also updated (and 111 more apps)
- MRT Buddy is new and helps you commute in Dhaka

Read more at https://f-droid.org/2024/11/21/twif.html

This week in #FDroid (TWIF):

- Inter Profile Sharing was added, so that you can share data between user profiles
- Headwind MDM Agent was updated, offering a FOSS mobile device management solution
- Minetest was renamed to Lunati
- OSM Dashboard (Offline) for OpenTracks is now reproducible, which means you have to re-install it to get this and future updates
- we archived the apps from Simple Mobile Tools (use the Fossify apps instead)

Read the details and more at https://f-droid.org/2024/11/14/twif.html

Hello dear K-9 users!

You probably got a suggested updated for K-9 to "Thunderbird Beta for Testers".

This is just a metadata issue, which displays a wrong name and icon. The update itself is K-9 in version 8.0. You don't get automatically switched over to Thunderbird.

This will probably be fixed in the next index update.

In other news: Thunderbird for Android is available now on #FDroid ;)

@organicmaps yes, our communication about this change was not ideal.

We tried to cover it in https://f-droid.org/2024/07/25/twif.html and https://f-droid.org/2024/04/04/twif.html, but apparently it wasn't read by everybody (surprise, surprise 🙈).

Unfortunately, we didn't find any good technical solution to enable the new Anti-Feature automatically (but only for those, who didn't change their AFs manually).

Moreover, this new AF was designed to clearly differentiate, that apps like OM are NOT NonFreeNet, but only TetheredNet.

We've signed an open letter to the European Commission in support for @EC_NGI

Their funding has enabled us and many other FLOSS projects to develop and maintain great software, from which everybody benefits.

However, their own funding is probably cut next year, which would have a big negative impact to FLOSS projects.

Read more at:
https://f-droid.org/2024/07/23/ngi-funding-open-letter.html

@pixelfed Hi there! :fdroid: :heart_pride: :pixelfed:

At its core, the #FreeSoftware movement is all about establishing basic user rights to use, study, share and improve software for any purpose. This is a fundamental core value of #FDroid.

While we think our work is very important, it's no substitute for vigilantly demanding basic #HumanRights. That's why we want to support the #lgbtqiaPlus community by participating in #PrideMonth. Stay strong. Stay proud. :heart_pride:

Friendly reminder if you're an open source developer in the mobile ecosystem:

You still have time until 1st of June to apply for a #mobifree grant.

https://nlnet.nl/mobifree/

This week in F-Droid (TWIF) was published again. We have some short sentences about:

- The new app AndroidIDE: no NDK support and F-Droid client does not build (yet)
- NewPipe updates still not reproducible
- SimpleX Chat update also for arm64
- Smoke and SmokeStack with new icon and older Android versions

On top of that, we updated 75 more apps.

https://f-droid.org/2024/01/11/twif.html

#FDroid