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Comment by aero-glide2 | Hacker News Reader

Recommend using SkyDroid to download Fdroid apps, much better search and UI.

Foxy Droid (https://github.com/kitsunyan/foxy-droid) is also a nice re-implementation of the old UI.

I use Aurora Droid, mostly because the same org also provides an anonymous Play Store frontend with similar UX.

And there's also Droid-ify, which uses a Material design style (I haven't used it, I've just found it looking for Foxy-droid)

https://www.skydroid.net/ ???

Oh!!!

https://skydroid.app/

Does it auto update? That's my main peeve with fdroid.

I don't think anything other than Google Play can auto update unless you've rooted your phone.

F-droid has a package you can install to the system partition to allow auto-updating.

Android 12 has a mechanism to allow an app that installed an application to update it in the background, but the client needs to be updated to support it.

F-Droid hasn't yet, see issue here [1] - some of the other F-Droid clients, like Droid-ify have [2].

[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/1836

[2] https://github.com/Iamlooker/Droid-ify/pull/159

You don't need root AFAIK, you do need an unlocked bootloader so you can flash the system partition though.

Exactly, this is only tangentially related to rooting. Google doesn't need root on your device for their closed Play Services to install software, but the component that you want to have this installation capability does need some system-level permission. Many people grant it that by rooting the device, but installing something like /e/OS (=Android with microG and a few other improvements) is also a way to do this.

On my Moto FDroid does a decent job of keeping my apps updated. I still have to intervene about half of the time though.

SkyDroid can update apps without user interaction (even on non-rooted devices) using a workaround which requires a one-time ADB setup. You however still need to open SkyDroid and click a button to start the mass-update process, but this is an intentional design decision - it makes sense to check which app updates are available before blindly updating everything.

Thank you for this. I love F-droid but I hate the app.

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