He has fixed them (1, 2) already. I’ve felt motivated thanks to his attitude, so I jumped back into activelly maintaining these apps and we are working on a new release of the launcher that will arrive soon, hopefully.
Also, I wanted to ask a question to the community. I’m working in providing a better experience for new users by populating the screens by default for new installs, like the original launcher of FP OS did. There’s a Google folder that is only created when the user has such apps installed (i.e. when you have GApps). In a similar fashion, a Google Search widget is pre-loaded on top of the screen. Users without GApps (we recognize there are a lot of users #livingwogoogle here, myself included) see an almost empty screen, then. I want to change that.
What do you prefer?
Put the Fairphone Clock widget in the main screen and remove the Google Search widget
Put the Fairphone Clock widget on top, followed by the Google Search below
Keep just the Google Search widget (users without GApps will see an almost empty screen)
@z3ntu did an outstanding work updating the project structure of the FP1 launcher, the FP2 clock widget and the FP2 contacts widget fixing some issues in the way. So they’re now less error-prone, more confortable to work on (including releasing new versions at F-Droid), and future-proof.
Thank you, Luca!
I added metadata summaries, descriptions and changelogs and updated the README files of the FP1 launcher, the FP2 clock widget, the FP2 contacts widget and the FP2 launcher, so they will look awesome from the moment a new update hits F-Droid, and will correctly inform new users about the origin of the apps and the (WeAre)Fairphone community (in English and Spanish as well! Ping me if you want to translate them to your mother tongue ).
For some unknown reason, you can preview this for the Fairphone Clock Widget already by visiting its listing pageinside the F-Droid app.
Some other non-updates
GitHub has been adquired today by Microsoft! A lot of FOSS developers don’t trust them and are already #movingtogitlab or other git hostages. Don’t worry: time ago, I did set up a WeAreFairphone group on GitLab that mirrors our repos, just in case something went horribly wrong, .
Last friday, while all of us where collaborating in real time on an issue, @Rudloff’s account and content (including issues, PRs and repos) suddenly dissapeared from GitHub (!). After some panicking, he reached us to tell that his account was flagged as spam. All content came back a few hours later and he tells how solved it here: How to correctly contact upstream app authors - fdroiddata - F-Droid Forum
All three of us agreed on renaming app repos from android_packages_apps_AppName to a more readable and easier to type FP1-AppName or FP2-AppName. Hooray!
An update about the previous poll
Unfortunately, this expected change will not make it to the next version of the Fairphone 2 Launcher. It seems like automatically adding widgets to the screen is a feature only available to system apps, thus not available to our standalone launcher. I’d love to have this feature, but it seems like we will need to spend some time researching and looking into how we can workaround this limitation. Too bad!
The long-awaited update of the Fairphone 2 Launcher fixing the installation issue on all Android versions is scheduled to come soon. Unfortunately, the improvement mentioned in my previous post will not make it yet (read below).
It could be achieved, for sure (there’s e.g. PaperLaunch with a similar feature), but I don’t know what difficulty it involves. However, since Oreo it has been proven more difficult to overlay things, though (I know because of Night Screen).
Being clear: personally, I’m probably not going to spend time in this in the near future. Ideally, we should fix some weird bugs before. But if you open an issue on the repo asking for the feature, all of us will be notified and other people might consider working on it!
Yes, that’s a known issue on the F-Droid side. However, when they update the web metadata from our repo, that’d be solved. It’s not happening on the Android client, BTW.
I installed the launcher right after publication on LineageOS with microg, but none of the apps has been moved to the inactive section so far. Am I missing something?
I have it on my FP1 and even though I use another launcher (KISS), the inactive section is filled with 75% of my apps. It took a couple of days until apps went to that section, though.
Hm, I don’t know exactly when it was published, but one or two days after, I installed it. So something seems to be ging wrong. Is this the right thread or should I open a new one?