Should Fairphone Open come pre-installed with f-droid?

FP1, surely. Privileged Extension is not compatible with Android 5.1+, even the two-days-ago update. If that worked, would solve a lot of problems, IMHO

Edit: Hmmm…

hc: we’re rearchitecting the F-Droid Privileged Extension around that

hc: the idea is so that it is designed to be built into ROMs and signed by the ROM key

Source

That’d can be a solution… when Privileged Extension supports Android 5.1+, though.
Actually, I was searching for the technical reason to not support 5.1+ on their issues when I bumped into this.

Edit 2: Woa! It can be already built into the ROM now! I overlooked that README part:

We need to find if they support 5.1+ or not (the only source telling me that is F-Droid itself when trying to install)

Edit 3:

Installing the F-Droid Privileged Extension directly from the F-Droid
app requires root access and is only possible on Android versions older
than 5.0. It is not possible on Android 5.1, 6.0, and newer.

Source.
I still don’t know if moving/building it into the system works for 5.1+ or what doesn’t work is just the automated F-Droid installation. Will open an issue tomorrow.

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I tried doing that a while ago on the FP2, no matter how I did it (through F-Droid or by hand-installing it as a privileged app) F-Droid never managed to recognize the app as correctly installed :confused:

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Very interesting poll!
I see that there are several considerations about the app being pre-installed as part of the system, or being simply installed afterwards. I’m not voting because I don’t understand the differences enough to be able to evaluate.

But I’d like to add my piece of bread here:

Reading the comments, I’m wondering if the kind of users answering to this post is representative of all users who installed FP Open OS, in terms of “IT knowledge”.
You already said it: if you are not a tech-savvy, and want to try to live out of Google → use Open FP OS, you’re forced to roam the forums looking for answers to very basic questions like making GPS work, installing an app manager, etc. This is tedious, specially if you are not interested in these topics and consider your phone should do its job out of the box.

I want to do the effort of installing FP Open OS even if I don’t enjoy having to look for answers to everything. But this is the reason why, when I talk about Fairphone to my working colleagues, familiars, friends I never tell them about FP Open OS: most of them would be strongly disappointed to a new device that doesn’t work out of the box.

So if we want to encourage these kind of people to use FP Open OS, preinstalling F-droid is not enough, and actually it’s not necessary. A guide telling about F-droid, GPS and two or three more basic tweaks would do the job (a guide like the one you did for installation of Open FP OS, it works fantastic!). But this is work that needs to be done, that’s why I ask: is there people out there that fit this profile, so the work is worth being done? And do we want them on board?

They won’t be answering the forums, because it’s not the kind of user dropping by, so it’s you who need to think about their needs and opinions, without their feedback.

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Hey Neus, thank you for your feedback. Remember that Fairphone Open has to be actively installed by a user. So there is no such thing as ‘Fairphone Open out of the box’. Your friends would, if they’d by a Fairphone 2, receive it with Fairphone OS. That OS is basically Android 5.1 with all google services included.

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Hi douwe,
You are right. But following your installation guide is fairly easy, and I would expect that once you installed FP Open OS, it would work out of the box.
My point is, if you have a good guide you are way more newbie-friendly. I would talk about FP Open OS if it was more newbie-friendly :slight_smile:

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4 posts were split to a new topic: Discussion about “First steps on FP Open” Wiki

How I understand this source https://gitlab.com/fdroid/privileged-extension#how-do-i-install-it-on-my-device:
“Installing the F-Droid Privileged Extension directly from the F-Droid … is only possible on Android versions older than 5.0. It is not possible on Android 5.1, 6.0, and newer” means for me that for us the passage above “The best way to install F-Droid Privileged Extension is to flash the update.zip file using the standard mechanism for flashing updates to the ROM.” is important.
Unfortunately the update.zip for the last version 0.2 (added 01.11.2016) is currently not available (https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged.ota) maybe because of problems in building process.

I’d like to add my support to making it so that F-droid can be used without having to check the allow-whatever-software box.

F-droid is a great app store though.

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@Douwe I think the poll result is quite clear.
Do you think this is something that could be realized soon, or is it more feasible to wait for Android 6?

Thanks all who voted and debated the different sites of the matter!

It is not my call, and I think the chance is big this will wait 'till Marshmallow, but I will make sure that this community vote and discussion is known with the developer team.

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I think, FP open should include no store. It should be easier to make f-droid a persistant system app after the user installed it. The open OS should be as slim as possible. Also the included musicplayer is too much for me. I disable it from beginning and install vanilla music. The same with the browser.

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The thing is: Many of the currently preinstalled apps like Browser, Camera, Downloads, Email and Search can’t compete with other apps of the same purpose and them being preinstalled brings no benefit to anyone. There are more downsides as some users actually think that because these apps are preinstalled they must be good, so they use them - with all the issues that come with them.

F-Droid on the other hand is the poster child of FLOSS app stores and preinstalling it brings additional benefits.
Sure an option to easily install it as a system app - or two versions of FP OS, one with and one without F-Droid would be ideal, but such special wishes probably bring an unreasonable increase of work for the devs as well as more opportunities for bugs.

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On the other side, it does not matter. You can deactivate the preinstalled apps you don’t like.
For me I like slim systems with less preinstalled apps, and not on the phone only.
But when f-droid will be preinstalled, please keep the client up to date.

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Can you? I can’t:

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You cannot?
I deactivated Email, Browser, Camera and Music. I am on FP open.

I’m on FP1. Apparently this is not available here…

Strange! I thought, that is a basic feature of Android.

You and @paulakreuzer can read three posts above about the inocuous F-Droid Privileged Extension. Included in the system and self-compiled by Fairphone, this offers the oportunity to keep the system slim, secure and updated easily and use F-Droid without including it in the system —if you want to use it. If not, just don’t install F-Droid, which is a normal app.

It’s healthy to read some post above before posting; you’ll usually find useful info always.

The feature is AOSP’s (from version 4.X, if I recall correctly), but differs from Android version to Android version, and from OEM implementation to OEM implementation.

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The previleged extension does not work on FP. And it seems, that there is no more progress
with it. I never got it to run on any device, even with Cyanogenmod.

I use f-droid myself, but I think, the open OS variant should come with nothing preinstalled. I
also use Amaze, but it should not be preinstalled. I don’t know, which apps are included in
the AOSP tree. There are 4 possible solutions:

  1. Like Sailfish OS does. Just ask the user with the first run what to install. I don’t know, if that would be possible in Android.

  2. An additional file for flashing with these preinstalled apps, just like the gapps package.

  3. Like CM did with the terminal app. It could be activated in the developer settings.

  4. Include what you think, that is useful.

The problem could be, just with a core system with nothing preinstalled, an less advanced user
could not know how to start.
But the voting seems to be clear. So it will be solution 4.

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I’m using it on FP Open and a familiar of mine runs it on a CM12.1 without troubles. I had to manually install it, though. The automatic installation from F-Droid seems to be the only thing not working on Android 5.1 and above.

Yes, there’s already a First Run Wizard. They need to handle users upgrading, though.

That’s the main problem, IMO. FP Open is used uually by more advanced and tech-savvy users, and that is bad. A normal user should have the oportunity to switch to Open and not need to enable the dangerous 3rd party apps check on its settings, and for that they need a trusted app store. F-Droid brings flexibility if you want to use it or not.

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