F-Droid @fdroidorg@mastodon.technology

The German Corona Warn App went live today. F-Droid cannot distribute the app for multiple reasons:

1) The core bluetooth contact tracing functionality is only implemented in Google play services and requires proprietary client libs to be included in the app.
2) The google api mentioned above is only available for use by apps which are whitelisted by google and distributed through the play store.

We just published a post with some #FDroid stats from 2019 and a call for support.

https://f-droid.org/en/2020/02/16/statistics_2019.html

F-Droid will soon have stricter requirements for apps showing up in the "Latest" tab in the F-Droid app:

https://news.f-droid.org/posts/2019-03-26-the-latest-tab-now-highlights-good-descriptions/

If you are an app developer consider adding good descriptions, screenshots and a "Whats's New" section for your app.

If you notice that your favourite app doesn't fulfill all these requirements consider notifying the app's developers or just help them with a merge request adding the missing info to the source repo.

You'll find the Changelog here: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#19-2020-06-25

There's a new F-Droid client release candidate (v1.9). If you want to test this, you can update to it manually from the F-Droid client. (Browse to the app, expand the version list and install the 1.9 version, make sure your repository index is up-to-date beforehand)

Please report any issue you find.

Berlin's privacy officer says use the F-Droid version of the jitsi app because of the trackers in the play store: https://www.datenschutz-berlin.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf/orientierungshilfen/2020-BlnBDI-Hinweise_Berliner_Verantwortliche_zu_Anbietern_Videokonferenz-Dienste.pdf (German, p. 13)

#fdroid server tools will remove the old .txt metadata file support in the next major release (2.0).

If you are a fdroid repository operator you should migrate to .yml metadata files.

You can do so right now by running:

`fdroid rewritemeta --to yml`

There's some crazy internal US politics right now that threatens #OpenTechFund, who funded #LetsEncrypt, #CertBot, @torproject , #NoScript, TLS ESNI/ECH, #DNSPrivacyProj, #ReproducibleBuilds, #Wireguard, #DeltaChat, #OpenKeychain, #pypi, @guardianproject , @signalapp , and more. Looks like a couple proprietary software companies are trying to take over this #FreeSoftware money. Please sign on to the campaign to try to stop it: https://saveinternetfreedom.tech

Also of note, if you are a play store user but still get some apps from F-Droid, Play Store billing will stop working for apps in F-Droid:

https://www.xda-developers.com/f-droid-android-apps-google-play-purchases/

It seems that Google wants to make using app bundles a requirement for new apps on Google Play in 2021: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=320&v=cMr-b660Esw

This would mean developers have to upload their signing keys to google play even though there's no technical benefit in doing that. You can achieve the same efficient download sizes by using bundletool locally and uploading all generated apks. But it seems google will stop allowing that and just wants your signing keys.

German Version:
Die #CoronaWarnApp wurde heute veröffentlich. DIe app kann es nicht bei F-Droid geben, da die Kernfunktionalität in den Google Play Services implementiert ist und proprietäre Bibliotheken in der App benötigt.
Außerdem erlaubt Google die Benutzung der Contact Tracing api nur speziell freigeschalteten Apps, die über den Play Store installiert worden sind.

You can read about the api usage terms here: https://blog.google/documents/72/Exposure_Notifications_Service_Additional_Terms.pdf

And more generally about how the whole system works here: https://www.google.com/covid19/exposurenotifications/

The German Corona Warn App went live today. F-Droid cannot distribute the app for multiple reasons:

1) The core bluetooth contact tracing functionality is only implemented in Google play services and requires proprietary client libs to be included in the app.
2) The google api mentioned above is only available for use by apps which are whitelisted by google and distributed through the play store.