Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

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I hear you on the bugs, but my main problem with it is that the search just never seems to return what I need. I don't know if it's me but I usually end up searching the internet for 'best foss android <thing>' or so.

Let's see: search for ssh (with the intent of finding an ssh client, that's not too far fetched?), these are the top matches: HACS Hackspace Access Control System, KOReader Ebook reader, AVNC VNC client, FTPClient an (s)ftp client, Linux command library, MultiVNC, SshDaemon.

So that last one is the only one which effectively has SSH in the name, and then I guess that FTPClient would be something I might want to see as well, and then the VNC clients perhaps.

So maybe 'ssh client' then? Yeah no, KOReader still first, then AVNC, FTPClient, SSHDaemon, ....

Ok, I get it, search is hard, and I assume they intentionally didnt want to sort by number of downloads (?), but what it does now is close to useless.

Have to agree that the search function is pretty dire; it only seems to work (mostly) if you already know the name of the application for which you are searching, which defeats its purpose.

Even worse if you search for terms like "git", "github", or "issues", terms that almost every app uses somewhere in their description or metadata. I would expect this to be trivial to fix. At least my experience with Algolia, Elastic, Meilisearch and even PG fulltext search make me believe it would be doable.

This! And I thought I'm just too stupid to use this search, ha! Search is hard, for sure, but come on. But you actually reminded me to just use Google Dorks for that with inurl:https://f-droid.org/packages/.

Sounds very familiar. I switched to Foxy Droid, an alternative F-Droid client, years ago partly because its search functionality is miles ahead of the official F-Droid app. The popular and newer Droid-ify and Neo Store are forks of it I think, so should offer the same improvements.

Top results for 'ssh' in Foxy Droid: ConnectBot (SSH client), SshDaemon (ssh server), RSSAid (RSSHub... nothing to do with SSH), Easy SSHFS (Sshfs with ssh client), Trigger (open doors via SSH), FiSSH (SSH authentication via fingerprint), TeamBot (SSH client), SimpleSSHD (SSH server), etc.

Those results do look spot on. But I just installed Neo Store inspired by comments here, and it shows none of the apps I currently have installed through F-Droid..

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