Since simple mobile tools will soon become a spyware and I use 3 of their apps regularly, yesterday I installed F-Droid after reading many Lemmy recommendations.
Wow, I'm pleasantly surprised.
A new app I've tested is Spotube (Spotify open source alternative; edit: apparently it uses Spotify metadata but it streams from YouTube. My bad.).
The dev said a couple of weeks ago that they're planning on closing their Google Play Developer account, so using the fork means you'll be able to keep up with new releases from that point.
I use it because it moves a lot of settings into the sync jobs.
So now I can set individual sync jobs to only run on my home wifi and ac power, and other sync jobs (like my photos) to sync over any network and any power state.
Interesting list.
Antennapod is an excellent podcast app - use it every day.
I've never found VLC to be bloated though. And am curious about the SyncThing fork vs. regular SyncThing.
If you want them, but you don't need but one of them. I like Obtainium the most as it updates from Github and F-droid, but i find Droid-ify makes it easy to search for new apps so i like to have it. I never liked F-droid Basic, but i would pick between that and Droid-ify for the best looking front end
Is Florisboard still being developed? Hasn't been updated in 18 months according to F-Droid. Some buttons generate a TODO pop-up when pressed and the predictive text still uses placeholder values.
Thanks. That appears to be quite an unfortunate turn of events. I just deleted and replaced the apps w/ alternatives I already have in my personal list.
Aaand now uninstall it again and try F-Droid Basic. Its the version of F-Droid using modern libraries, which is way more secure. Featurewise that means modern apps have automatic updates
Annoying but thats why I always recommend to install that APK instead. You can just install it from F-Droid.
I tried all other F-Droid clients and they all have some bugs. G-Droid is discontinued but had an awesome rating system, Neostore has cool features but seemed buggy, Droid-ify is just fancy and has many repos preinstalled (but deactivated).
The lack of 3rd party repos being already in the menu with just a click away is the only problem with the official clients.
I'm still routinely amazed Unciv is allowed to continue to exist, and that it's becoming so increasingly polished. It's not a perfect recreation of Civ 5, it probably never truly can be in terms of hardware limitations, but it's incredible just how damn close they've managed to get it.
It's also exceedingly dangerous for me, as someone who struggles with ADHD, to have Civ 5 on my phone. It has caused more than a few >30 minute bathroom breaks.
That said, I kinda wish the dev wouldn't push version updates for every single little thing. I can go weeks without most F-Droid apps needing to update, but I seem to get a notification to update Unciv like every 2 days.
If you get Fdroid basic or I think droidify you get auto updates without notifications. This is more of an app store issue than one with the unciv releases.
I moved a lot of my foss apps over to f-droid. But i'm a little worried about security.
The odds of a bad actor being able to takeover f-droid and update my keepass app with a malicious version seems a lot higher than someone being able to do the same google play, right?
This F-Droid-like model (also popularly implemented by Linux distributions) is usually considered an improvement in security.
The thing with FOSS is that ideally you don't have to trust the developer at all.
In theory, you could read the entire source code and compile it yourself. Then you'd know for sure that no malware is included.
Obviously, in practice, you can only hope that some nerds dig into the source code and notify journalists of malware-like behaviour.
It is no perfect protection. But it is the only tangible protection that FOSS actually delivers.
What does not protect you, is to trust each individual developer. They could publish innocous source code and then build the release binaries from a version with the malware-like behaviour patched in.
But because you likely don't want to compile each app yourself, you might still feel compelled to entrust that work to a third party. This is where the F-Droid team comes in. Rather than trusting each developer, you just have to trust a single team.
Well, and if an app is built in a reproducible build, then even the work from the F-Droid team can be verified.
You consider using Obtainium instead? It installs (and updates) directly from source release (Github repo, etc). That puts you directly in control of everything then.
Are there any alternative repos I'm missing out on guys? I just took everyones advice and started using f-droid lite. Noticed you can add repos so I'm curious
Foxy Droid: alternative F-Droid-Client but with the classic and for me much more accessible UI of the old F-Droid-Client. Uses the exact same repos. Can be downloaded using the normal F-Droid-Client, which then can be uninstalled