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Comment by redox99 | Hacker News Reader

After more than a decade, the UI for updating apps in F Droid is still very buggy. One of its most basic and fundamental features. I don't get it.

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Still not perfect but it improved a lot in the last year. When it says update, it really updates now, and when it says updated it's updated. Running the package installer works, etc. I believe that all the process is not very well integrated because it must run external components, whilst Play does it internally, but I might be wrong.

Agree, did a big update yesterday and the entries in the Update tab still get stuck in "Downloading" state even when they finished installing.

But oh well, it does work in fine. Still a bit sad they destroyed the UI usability years ago on the altar of material design.

These days even automatic updates are working. But I agree the UI of the official app (there are others) isn't amazing.

> But I agree the UI of the official app (there are others) isn't amazing.

I think it does help that there are others. The official app should be good, but there's a decent collection of others that can do things better. If nothing else, they can make different tradeoffs, like only supporting new Android versions.

> there are others

Relevant: Droidify https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/ (meta lol)

This is the one I use and has worked pretty much flawlessly since day 1. I highly recommend it. I don't even have the f-droid app itself installed anymore.

Not here, no. Updates don't work (a year-old Nokia). I used F-Droid to install Hacker's Keyboard and some FTP server. Both programs still work, but when F-Droid tries to upgrade anything it hangs for a while and then displays some error message. Well... I don't really care, as long as the programs I need sort of work.

I checked the requirements and automatic updates are supported from F-Droid 1.19 and Android 12. However it sounds like you may have a different issue.

It's definitely trying to update. But I'm no Android developer, so I never investigated the problem. And, frankly, if I will desperately need an upgrade, I'll just remove it and install it fresh. It's not a big deal.

at least it's less annoying than Google Play :-)

Just use NeoStore. Uses F-Droid on the back-end but is somewhat less buggy, has a few more features, and is a lot more modern.

sigh. diffusion of effort in open source is commonly pointed to as a reason for poor adoption

I agree. But the nature of open source means that you can't force someone to work on something, unlike a job. And for whatever reason, open source seems to attract people that would rather be principled and split a project into two barely viable one's, rather than be receptive to feedback, compromise / find common ground and work together to something better.

GIMP is the best example of this. Years back a few devs tried to get it renamed from GNU Image Manipulation Program to GNU Libre Image Manipulation Program (GLIMP), because multiple people found it embarassing or even got shot down by their boss for suggesting to use and donate to a program named GIMP.

What happened? GIMP devs did a big nuh-uh, dug in their heels, and the other devs forked GIMP into GLIMP for a while. GlIMP is no longer maintained now, and GIMP still gets scraps for funding :)

It is also completely unusable on Android TV devices.

Not "completely", but it is a pain.

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