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

[jnsp]

@laserjay

Also if the current code maintainers could tell me which format and resolutions you need?

Different devices need them in different resolutions, have a look at the Android UI guidelines for more informaton about format and resoultion.

[laserjay]

@jnsp

Different devices need them in different resolutions, have a look at the Android UI guidelines for more informaton about format and resoultion.

Widgets have icons on the phones as well? I thought the Launcher and both Widgets don’t need any device icons, but only F-Droid store icons?

[Roboe]

Yes, they have. They are apps and thus have icons, even when they cannot be launched in the common way. You can observe those icons when installing them or looking at the app list on settings.

An icon mocking the disposition of the widget’s elements could do. It’s practical, though a challenge fitting it in that little space, I guess.

[laserjay]

@jnsp

Different devices need them in different resolutions, have a look at the Android UI guidelines for more informaton about format and resoultion.

This might be a bigger task then, I can’t promise to get on it during the next days…

Another question for me is more out of principle: Which software and format should be used to keep all the source files open and accessible for anyone? An icon designer should commit those to the repo I guess?

In this regard, I only have proprietary software.

[Stefan]

I’m not sure whether the source files for the icons need to be open source too, as long as the pngs are.

For open source software you would use Inkscape (vector) and/or GIMP (raster).

[Douwe]

Please note that some graphics, like these icons, are licensed from a third party and are protected under copyright.

It is great that these widgets, launchers and apps are taken over by the community (woohoo!) but be careful when using designs from the Fairphone website.

[Stefan]

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I don’t see an “otherwise note”.

[Roboe]

Clock Widget just hit F-Droid!

[Roboe]

BTW, @jnsp, can I edit the first post to add the progress and make it a wiki post? (I have mod rights kindly granted by @Douwe, )

[jnsp]

@Roboe

can I edit the first post to add the progress and make it a wiki post?

Sure, let’s make it a wiki

[Opsylac]

Hi @Roboe ! Thanks for sharing this Clock Widget, I missed it a lot.
But I have 2 problems :
1/ when I tap on the clock, it doesn’t shift to “peace of mind” or anything else, it just remains on the clock
2/ I can’t find how to put this widget on my lock screen as it was before

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me !

[jnsp]

These features are not part of the widget, the lock screen widget from Fairphone OS 5.1 which features “Peace of Mind” and other features is actually a different widget.

I’ll see what I can do, I haven’t found the source code for that yet.

[Stefan]

@Opsylac

1/ when I tap on the clock, it doesn’t shift to “peace of mind” or anything else, it just remains on the clock

@jnsp

These features are not part of the widget

The F-Droid description says:

You can cycle through the clock by tapping on it, and it will show different data, for example:

• how long you own your Fairphone (this data is pulled from the motherboard manufacturer date)
• until what time the battery will last
• the amount of time you’ve had ‘peace of mind’ (based on Android’s “no interruptions” setting).

[jnsp]

I just digged through the source code and found it in the package Keyguard.

I’m currently not sure if we can pull these features out of that package and put them into the clock widget. The F-Droid description is wrong

Edit: So Keyguard actually is the part of the lock screen that handles the unlock mechanism (e.g. slide to unlock, pin code, password or pattern). Seems like Fairphone built the peace of mind widget right into that.

Edit 2: Ok, I’m confident that we can enhance the clock widget with the Peace Of Mind and eventually the remaining battery life functionality. However it is currently unclear to me if the “Your Fairphone since” functionality works on other devices as well. If not, we could simply only display that on Fairphones. The data for that is read from /persist/board_date.bin. The second thing is that I don’t know how Android handles lock screen widgets and whether it is actually possible to install this as lock screen widget on a stock ROM.

Edit 3: There needs to be some work done, especially regarding the battery statistics (widget is using classes that are not availabe to normal apps). Will take a few days.

[Roboe]

I only did some code mirroring and administrative stuff. All the work here has been done by @jnsp, thank him, not me,

---

@jnsp: oops, I’m late. I could have saved you some search time with that. I inspected Keyguard sources few days ago.

Android 5+ don’t support lockscreen widgets anymore (unlike KiKat did). The only way to achieve that behaviour would be coding an alternative lockscreen with the widget embedded, although that sounds a little error-prone.

Backporting the lockscreen widget functionality to the regular Clock Widget seems the first thing to do, anyway. Skipping the Fairphone-specific part doesn’t sound to be extremely difficult (check the phone model), but there’s in fact work with the battery stats.

[Freso]

@Stefan

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

I don’t see an “otherwise note”.

Note that “a Creative Commons License” can be so, so many different things. A CC BY or CC0 is vastly different to a CC BY-NC-ND license, and the Attribution clause can also be tricky if you don’t know the copyright holder/original creator.

[Douwe]

Hey all, one thing we noticed here at Fairphone: the package name of the app can not be the same as the original package for two reasons:

• it will cause a conflict with the signature of our version of the app and the installation might fail.
• people might get confused about the creator of these apps. So referencing Fairphone as the origin of this code is fine, but it should be clear it is a community (WeAreFairphone) project now.

Keep on pushing!

[Roboe]

Oh, right, I already gave that some thought…

@Douwe

people might get confused about the creator of these apps. So referencing Fairphone as the origin of this code is fine, but it should be clear it is a community (WeAreFairphone) project now.

You are absolutely right.

So we clearly need a bit of a refactor to avoid conflicts with official apps, to state clear that’s a community work and a more intelligible app descriptions crediting Fairphone for the original work.

Ok, first things first. Namespace to use on package signatures to avoid com.fairphone. Usually it refers to an internet domain, so we can use community.fairphone, but that doesn’t identify clearly the WeAreFairphone movement/organization. What about org.wearefairphone?

Should we open a poll about this with more options than community.fairphone and org.wearefairphone?

[jnsp]

@Douwe

it will cause a conflict with the signature of our version of the app and the installation might fail.

This is only the case on Android 5.1, since it is not installed on Android 6 ROMs.

@Douwe

people might get confused about the creator of these apps. So referencing Fairphone as the origin of this code is fine, but it should be clear it is a community (WeAreFairphone) project now.

I totally agree with you on this, however, we have already published two of the widgets on F-Droid and it might be difficult to change the package name now. We have to request a removal of the widgets on F-Droid and re-publish them. Users that have already installed the widgets might have to reinstall them.

@Roboe

Should we open a poll about this with more options than community.fairphone and org.wearefairphone?

Yup, could you create a one?

Besides the package name, has anyone considered registering a community domain and hosting a small website that is collecting information about the work of the community? We could use the same domain as our package name.