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

[Roboe]

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

@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.

[chrisse]

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!

[paulakreuzer]

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.

[antzen]

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 ?

[Roboe]

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,

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:

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…

[antzen]

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.

[Roboe]

No, the installation bug happened in Android 5.1 too.

But at the same time yes, because Android 6 introduced a new permission policy —you, the user, need to explicitly allow those marked as dangerous— and it is required to update some portions of the code (i.e. changing the background is currently crashing the launcher because of not-explicitly-requested storage access).

[Roboe]

There’s some activity here again!

@Rudloff has been clearing some F-Droid backlog and contributing to the WeAreFairphone apps. He published the Fairphone Launcher 3, which unfortunatelly had some bugs (as pointed by @antzen above).

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.

Congratulate @Rudloff for his outstanding work!

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)

Show results

[Roboe]

We’ve been working hard at the GitHub organization the past two weeks, so here comes an status update.

A (geeky) summary

Since May 20, @Rudloff, @z3ntu and myself

• have pushed 57 new commits
• and closed 12 issues
• through a total of 19 pull requests!

3 apps will be updated because of these efforts!

Some highlights

(not strictly chronological and not including all changes):

• We have forked and hosted the source code of the Fairphone 1 apps —designed by Kwamecorp— for archiving purposes.
• …although there’s a new adopted app derived from that effort: @Rudloff splitted the Fairphone First Edition Launcher from the archive, fixed some issues, we updated it and it will be available in F-Droid soon!
  • Thank you, Pierre!
• @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 page inside 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

@Roboe

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.

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!

F-Droid updates coming!

• The new Fairphone First Edition Launcher will soon be available in F-Droid.
• 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).
• A new update to the Fairphone Clock Widget featuring a more tight size to fit in smaller screens/spaces and reaction to the “12/24 hour format system” preference (a feature that was hidden in the code for some reason) is waiting to be built.

---

Fire up your F-Droid app, update your repos and stay tuned!

[Stefan]

Do you think it would be possible to have Edge Swipe as an oberlay app that overlays other launchers (e.g. KISS)?

[Roboe]

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!

[Stefan]

Bummer… PaperLaunch requires Android 5.0 or above… Thank you for the suggestion, though!

[antzen]

Hi there,

If your are nostalgic of the Android 5 “edge swipe” (like me !), you can now install it from F-droid and it works perfectly with Lineage !

Thanks to develloppers !

Enjoy !

antzen

[Roboe]

I moved your post because it belongs here,

Also, take a look at the first post for more Fairphone-nostalgic apps,

[Friek]

@Roboe

there’s e.g. PaperLaunch with a similar feature)

thanks for the hint. Installed it directly.

[antzen]

Didn’t know where to post exactly …

Thanks

[Roboe]

@Roboe

new update to the Fairphone Clock Widget featuring a more tight size to fit in smaller screens/spaces and reaction to the “12/24 hour format system” preference (a feature that was hidden in the code for some reason)

The 2.1.0 version of the Fairphone Clock Widget is now live on F-Droid,