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Comment by piaste | Hacker News Reader

F-Droid is what you're looking for. Both as a developer and as a user.

I hate "this!" comments, but F-Droid is the thing that keeps me an Android user and makes me a die-hard proponent of alternative app stores (and why I'd use an iPhone if I could get something like F-Droid (with Termux) on it). Even phones with no other app store can install F-Droid, and it has enough good software that I can do most everything I need with only F-Droid.

    - FFUpdater for installing browsers (Mull on my phone, Brave on my tablet because keyboard support)
    - Termux for all my CLI work
    - KeepassDX for passwords
    - Syncthing for syncing
    - Etar for calendaring
    - VLC for media
    - Kore to control my media center
    - RCX for running local webdav servers (good for hosting Tiddlywiki and FeatherWiki locally on-device with WebDAV-based saving)
    - Tiddloid for notetaking when I'm not using RCX instead
    - Conversations for XMPP chat with family/friends
    - KOReader for ebooks
    - MullvadVPN for ... VPN
    - OsmAnd~ for mapping, including offline maps
    - "Puzzles" and Unciv for gaming
    - Trail Sense for navigation/survival

I know this is a laundry list, but my point is that it's a trove of exactly the sort software I like to develop and use. Thanks for mentioning it!

You might like to know that RCX has a new, maintained fork in RoundSync [0].

If you're just running it as a local webdav server, you can just stick with the current version. But if you also use it for the more typical rclone tasks (keeping cloud storage synchronised), RoundSync is updated and fixes some things that were missing in RCX, like cronjobs.

[0] https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync

I wish there was a desktop equivalent of this app, time to fork RcloneBrowser ;)

I've considered it, but I'm not sure if the audience size is worth it and the store used to be so broken that I don't know if it wouldn't be even more frustrating to work with them than it is to work with Google Play.

In particular, I've consistently heard that it takes them forever to update app versions. At least https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2316 seems to be fixed now - it used to require user interaction for each update, which doesn't work when you have dozens of apps (and updating from the notification also had some kind of bug requiring extra manual steps).

Maybe I should give them another try, how is the developer experience nowadays?

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