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Comment by app4soft | Hacker News Reader

> If the motivation and energy ever return I could consider moving to normal F-Droid, which will require stripping out GDrive, Dropbox and a few other proprietary features.

Switch to F-Droid!

- Remove GDrive/Dropbox and other proprietary features;

- Add Nextcloud/ownCloud/Syncthing and similar open-source features;

- Fully move to F-Droid;

- Remove page from Google Play Store.

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Unfortunately, Google prevents F-Droid from competing with the Play Store on feature parity, because F-Droid is not allowed to do batch installs, background installs, or auto-upgrading due to limitations put in Android.

But there’s still a core group of people willing to put up with that and use F-Droid, and having the app used by that group of enthusiasts is better than it not being used at all.

Considering this app is used a lot on older secondary phones, it’s actually very likely people who want to use it would go to the little bit of extra effort required to use it via F-Droid.

I agree, I just wanted to point out Google's anti-competitive behavior regarding app distribution on Android.

Note that you can totally do all of those if you root your device. Highly recommend.

or by having Privileged Extension (for background installs & auto-upgrading) and a personal repo (for batch installs)

Well the privileged extension requires root, which is what I was alluding to in my post :)

Not necessarilly. One can enjoy Privileged Extension on an unrooted phone by using a custom ROM, LOS for example.

edit: typo

The privileged extension does not require root.

You _can_ install it with Magisk (which also provides root) but it can also be flashed as a regular flashable ZIP (which just requires an unlocked device).

Last (and best) of all, it can be added to an unrooted ROM. RattlesnakeOS[0] for example includes it.

[0]: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack

Ah I was wondering what was going on. The newest version of F-Droid updated all my apps with a single one-click update prompt. I remember the pain of previous releases where you had to manually update each and every app.

Rooting is great, where possible. Many cheaper devices though are still unrootable, usually because it hasn't been possible to build a version of TWRP for them.

Many non-cheap ones too, notably Samsung and LG (in the US).

If you want rooting and a bunch of storage, your non-cheap options get harshly limited. Looking for such a phone over the last few months, the options for my carrier were Motorola or bust. Which means getting an Edge, which are goofy and expensive and have defective screens.

So I gave up and got my first unrootable phone, from Samsung.

auto-upgrading is not a good thing and the play store tries to force it on you

They've recently announced they're planning on making 3rd party store experience better in Android 12 (next year's version). They haven't shared any specifics.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/listening-...

I've had a merge request open to add an app to F-Droid for 4 months now.

It's gotten some attention, and I've addressed all the requests for changes I've gotten. But still, no resolution after 4 months.

In contrast it took me a few days at most to publish to Google Play and the App Store, which I did at the same time as I submitted to F-Droid. And I've shipped numerous updates to both since then.

So "Switch to F-Droid!" rings a little hollow for me.

Maybe you're interested in SkyDroid (it's decentralized and publishing only takes 10 minutes): http://skydroid.app/

It's on "Izzy's F-Droid"[0] although, I don't know why there's a separate F-Droid repo...

[0]: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.mendhak.gpslogg...

> I don't know why there's a separate F-Droid repo...

You mean why there's a separate "Izzy's F-Droid" repo?[0]

[0] https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info

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