To be fair, those apps were plagued with poor security practices to begin with. Switch to GrapheneOS and get your apps via Obtainium. Check out privsec.dev for why you shouldn’t use F-droid. Open source apps are great but some have really bad security practices unfortunately.
The dev has been working hard on a whole suite of apps for years, taking only donations, so I can sympathize if he wants to sell out and be done with it, even if it’s very against the free software way.
What is reactionary is the abysmal choice of a company this is. Imagine seeing your old projects now with craptier subscriptions, ads and spyware. I wonder if the main dev even cares. Other contributors are having serious discussions about the copyleft licensing and the legality of this but it seems like the dev and ZipoApps (the company) won’t give a single flying fuck.
On the other hand, there are many free software alternatives on F-Droid. And the whole thing is probably being panick-forked too. Doesn’t make the situation surrounding free software vs. capitalism any better though.
This makes some fair points regarding signing practices. Although I’d point out F-Droid isn’t just the F-Droid repo, there are also others, like Izzy’s as well as dev’s own repos. Obtainium is a lot easier, in a way, but the repos are a good way to look for apps. I’m using Droidify and it’s good. The article seems to think Droidify rebranded to Neo Store but they are separate apps made by separate communities.
F-Droid is also undergoing a bit of drama at the moment with leadership on GitLab. I think it’s good to remind ourselves that open source (or free software) is not equivalent to security. Nevertheless, it’s still better than GPS (I know you can run GPS sandboxes on Graphene but I’m on Graphene and I’d rather stay away from it, even though this article seems to go light on Google). Paired with Obtainium, it’s s a good setup for discovery + frequent updates.
Interesting. I have been using Fdroid for a long time. I just installed Accrescent, and it’s pretty bare-bones. Hopefully it will continue to develop and grow.
On the other hand, there are many free software alternatives on F-Droid.
I managed to delete Simple Gallery and Notes. I use Notally instead of Notes and Aves Libre for Gallery, though Aves Libre feels pretty bloated, annoying to navigate, and yet has missing functionalities I was used to using in Simple Gallery. I had Etar on my phone, but I couldn’t update it because LineageOS now uses it for a calendar, and I am stuck on an old version of LineageOS on my phone with very little space until I can backup my phone and update the OS, which requires me to finish my Gentoo laptop installation which I have been struggling with for months (recently, I have been spending weeks trying to make the kernel boot as an EFI stub and unlocking a luks partition using argon2id, and it refuses to recognize the dracut cmdline to open the UUID/PARTUUID as the kernel panics for some reason even though I have fiddled with various configs). There’s just Etar and Simple Calendar if I want an offline calendar, and Etar was very lacking in basic features and wouldn’t import my events from Simple Calendar in one file for all events. I tried uninstalling Etar to reinstall the updated version, but now I can’t install the new version and the old one is no longer available, so I am screwed for now. I was surprised how little choice there is for free software Android applications, and I don’t like most Android apps. Simple Mobile Tools was bearable for simple applications with a clean interface I really wanted, but now I am forced to find alternatives. I really can’t wait to get my Linux phone for Christmas.
Edit: Good news, it looks like a fork is being made by a long-time contributor: https://github.com/SimpleMobileTools/General-Discussion/issues/241#issuecomment-1837464578
Old org:
https://github.com/FossifyXRenamed org: https://github.com/FossifyOrg
The issue is that if these apps end up abandoned, Android updates will break these applications eventually. I really do not like the Android ecosystem, and I can understand why the dev would not want to support upcoming Android versions. Like I said, I look forward to using a Linux phone, even with the quirks and challenges I will face with it. I look forward to having a physical keyboard with the PinePhone as that will make using emacs on a mobile device easier for me. I want to learn emacs as its ecosystem of applications are absolutely god-tier, and I like emacs’ ethos and community.
Sorry, I did go on a few tangents here.
If you must use the F-droid repo, use Neo Store instead. The official F-droid client has severe security issues.
