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

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.

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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!

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Oh, right, I already gave that some thought…

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?

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

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.

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.

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We could basically use this one:

At the moment http://fairphone.community points to the forum, but I think that a real landing page would be better.

I think that community.fairphone actually can identify WeAreFairphone in contrast to com.fairphone. The thing is that Fairphone has registered fairphone.community for the community’s use and we would otherwise have to register another domain.

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It’s just a namespace, it doesn’t have to be a real domain. It can be just wearefairphone, but I suggested that because permuting a domain is the most common practice.

Using community.fairphone as the namespace and bringing up a landing page (hosting it at GitHub Pages?) for the WeAreFairphone movement seems to be the best idea.

I can do the web thing, :wink:

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Hi,
I’m on Fairphone Open OS. I just wanted to let you know that F-Droid wanted to update My contacts from 2.0 to 2.1 today. So I guess that there is a conflict with the signature.

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@chrisse Thanks for this info. I just installed version 2.1 under MM, now the widget displays fine.

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At least one FPoOS user (@conrad) had troubles with this:

I sincerely apologize for the troubles.

I just opened an issue at github to tackle the package name problem as soon as possible:

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We are currently considering to change the package name. Currently we use the same package name as Fairphone did and we have updated the widget so that it can be displayed on other devices as well.

Because of the update and the new version number introduced by it, F-Droid shows you that an update is available for the widget. For anyone running Android 6, this should not be a problem, since those apps are no longer distributed with the OS. If you are on Fairphone Open (that still runs on Android 5.1 and comes bundled with those widgets), you won’t be able to install the update or uninstalling the old version (because it is a system app).

Fairphone Open is expected to switch to Android 6 this month, so the package conflict won’t be a problem for most users after that. Furthermore we are looking into how we can change the package name of the widgets, which might me a bit tricky now that we have already published them on F-Droid.

In the meantime, you can simply ignore the update in F-Droid. There is an option to ignore this update in the F-Droid client.

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Nope, I checked both checkboxes and I still get notifications from F-Droid all the time…

It works for me (and worked with other apps since I use F-Droid for the first time, years already). It seems like your F-Droid is behaving oddly.

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New versions of My Contacts and Clock widgets are now available fixing the package name conflict. Thanks guys. :thumbsup:

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Oh, you must have automatic updates downloading enabled. Try to clear F-Droid’s cache to clear the notifications forever, :wink:

@paulakreuzer: Yes! Thanks to @eighthave from here. We’ll wait a week for the people to migrate to the new apps and then disable the old ones.

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On FopenOS, F-droid still wants to update these 2 apps.
I don’t mind and don’t want to complain, it’s just to let you know!

Yes for a while, but then these “legacy” apps will be moved to the archive. So as long as you don’t activate the F-Droid archive repository you won’t get that prompt anymore then.

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Hi folks,

I just found that Fairphone “Show Mem” app is in the F-droid catalog.

I don’t understand if this is app can be installed with Marshmallow in order to get the “Edge Swipe” and remove the Marshmallow launcher.
I’m on Lineage OS so I could not installed it.

Do anybody tried it ?

Hi, I’m one of the maintainers of the app (WeAreFairphone at GitHub). This is the “Fairphone Launcher 3” app that Fairphone OS included before the Marshmallow release, featuring Edge Swipe, to be installed in any Android 5.1+ system (so yes, Fairphone OS Marshmallow and LineageOS).

It currently can’t be installed on OSes with AOSP launchers or with AOSP-based launchers (as LineageOS). Sorry about that. We have solved it already and will release a new version soon, :+1:

The “Show Mem” label is a bug F-Droid had parsing the app for its name, BTW.

Once we have this solved, I’ll update the old thread where all begun:

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So, if I understand correctly the app needs to be updated to work with Android 6 ?
If yes, will it work with Android 7 or is it too early to confirm ?

Thanks.