Fairphone Community F-Droid Repo

[Roboe]

@paulakreuzer

Do you think it would be a good idea to set up an F-Droid App Repo for apps developed by the Fairphone Community?

I think it is a bit overwhelming to set up and maintain a server for so few apps. I was aware of a method for setting up easily a F-Droid repo backend-less (through GitHub/GitLab Pages), but I can’t find it now… I think this repo is hosted that way. Anyone can help me find its source?

That would be ideal:

• No server to maintain (rely on GitHub Pages or GitLab Pages to serve the content)
• It will be a git repo, which would be forkable, thus collaborative
• Independent

---

@paulakreuzer

I’d suggest mainly using it for alpha and beta stage apps (before they can be pushed to the official F-Droid repo) and for experimental apps

That’s ok…

@paulakreuzer

but also it may be nice to put all the stable apps there that are already on F-Droid, just to see what the FP community already created

…but that’s not ok. Android apps are signed by the app builder, which often it is the developer. In the case of F-Droid apps, apps are built by them from source code, and they sign them. Hosting the same apps as F-Droid but with different signatures would be painful, because you cannot install an update of an app over another with a different signature (that’s the Android Security Model, and it’s a good thing).

We’ll be duplicating F-Droid infrastructure for nothing, and confusing users.

More on that here

---

@paulakreuzer

Obviously the FP Specific Apps from Android 5 would go there once they are ready for testing,

Hey! Should anyone want to help, please continue here:

Publishing Fairphone-specific apps (Launcher, Contact Widget...) on F-Droid

This is a #wiki post, feel free to edit it clicking on the green above Fairphone-specific apps are Free Software under Apache License 2.0 and have been migrated to the community-managed WeAreFairphone organization at GitHub. Work has been done to publish them on F-Droid and making them compatible with Android 6 and forward. Team: @jnsp, @Rudloff, @z3ntu and @Roboe (two latters are managers of the WeAreFairphone organization at GitHub) Progress is as follows: Fairphone First Ed…

---

@paulakreuzer

may I also suggest an app that I’d really love to see (but may stay an unrealizable dream), namely:

An advanced Updater App with which you can:

• Install any #software:alternative-oses that have a flashable zip.
• Update a modified OS in one go (automatically detect and download all modifications and flash them along with the update in recovery mode).
• Select system apps that should not be touched by an update.

Uh, this may need another thread of its own. Last one is impossible in practice and the others have their own challenges to beat.