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0 pointsyohui10y ago0 comments

Are there any other good sources for open source Android apps?

I love F-Droid, but they plan to drop Firefox, and Chromium will never make it on there.

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wutbrodo10y ago· 2 in thread

Do you know why they're planning to drop Firefox? And why would Chromium never make it on there? I don't know much about F-Droid and its limitations.

EDIT: Okay I did the Google search that I should've just done in the first place. Apparently they're not dropping Firefox fully, but rather forking it to "remove the proprietary binaries out of the official builds" (Google Play API, etc). I suppose APIs like that are important enough to your use-case that you need an alternative source for Firefox?

yohuiOP10y ago

F-Droid wants to drop Firefox because Google Play is now required to build it (though not to run it). Same reason why Chromium isn't being considered: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/chromium/page/2/#post-16388

F-Droid has (temporarily?) taken down their Fennec fork, seemingly due to difficulties with development: https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/please-do-not-drop-firefox-...

This is presumably why Firefox's removal has been continuously postponed. Reliability is one of the reasons why I would prefer first-party Firefox over a third-party fork.

Though there are good reasons why F-Droid doesn't include Chromium and seeks to remove Firefox, the absence of many open source Android apps from F-Droid's catalog has a direct impact on utility. It's also not uncommon for apps on F-Droid to lag behind the version on Google Play or the latest release direct from the developer. (Again, there are good reasons why they screen apps, but it does impose a delay.)

I appreciate F-Droid's screening process, and I wouldn't want it to go away, but it'd be nice to have an alternative open source Android app catalog that's a little more liberal.

wutbrodo10y ago

Gotcha, so very roughly speaking the same reason that people sometimes leave Debian for Ubuntu, because they hit the balance between ideological purity and convenience a bit better.

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