After a few month hiatus, our staging setup for the complete buildserver is again running, thanks to the Reproducible Builds team who host that infrastructure. These Continuous Integration (CI) jobs create a complete buildserver from scratch once a week based on the current source code (e.g. master). This...

We keep a database containing structured information about all apps we’re shipping. Architecture-wise, this is a set of plain text files in a version control system. It’s the heart of our data-driven app building- and distribution- systems. Maybe you’ve heard someone mentioning F-Droid Data already. Occasionally we also refer...

In the past week, a controversy around F-Droid took place at its forum and in the fediverse. We feel like we have to put out a public statement to clear F-Droid’s position on it.

To recap the situation: a website joined the fediverse only half a month ago that...

This Week In F-Droid 64, Week 28, 2019

In this edition: F-Droid 1.7 released, Tutanota now has a calendar, OSMAnd 3.4 beta, Orbot update, Info on reproducible builds, Tusky & Gab discussion closed, and report on localization of F-Droid apps.

“Bus factor” is an important measure of the health of a free software project, even though the idea is quite morbid. As F-Droid has expanded from a project of one to a whole community effort. And there is much more work than one person can do. Essential infrastructure needs to...

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol that powers most of the internet these days. It gives HTTPS the S for “Secure”. F-Droid uses it to keep the connection to repos private. After many years of slow updates and an increasing number of vulnerabilities, there is finally critical mass to...

There are many reasons why it is often better to do things without the internet:your data plan is expensive, there is limited coverage in the area, there is an internet outage or shutdown, or even something is private and should not be online at all. Or even, if you are...

Sometimes we have things on our devices that are very sensitive, so much so that we need to completely hide or delete them in emergencies. F-Droid already supports receiving PanicKit triggers to make F-Droid hide itself. F-Droid v1.7 adds more alpha features to expand the range of options of...