Make available trough F-droid

[forteller]

A great Free software product like this should be available trough a Free software app store for those who don't want to let Google and their proprietary software in to their most intimate parts of their lives (which is on their phone).

Please make Simplenote available trough http://f-droid.org/

[fayad]

Appreciate automattic for opensourcing simplenote. But please add it to f-droid, for those who rely only on f-droid for apps.

[fayad]

A follow up to this.

[geekpete]

Opensource apps belong on f-droid for choice.

[rayeshman]

I'll second this

[thenanobel]

Why is this still not available on F-Droid? Can anyone tell me?

[andreyrd]

It could be because it includes Google Play Services. https://f-droid.org/en/docs/Inclusion_Policy/

[forteller]

I use it on my Lineage OS phone without Google PS, though. Haven't noticed any problems.

[roundhill]

I don't think any of the Automattic apps are on F-Droid. I'll make a note to discuss it with the team. Is downloading it here from the releases tab too much of a pain for y'all?

[forteller]

Yes! I want Free and open source applications on a free and open platform to be available for everyone! What happens if half the applications says "is it too much of a pain for you to go to our website to download it and never get any notifications of updates, having to check and update manually yourself whenever you remember"? What happens is that the dream of more people using FOSS apps on FOSS platforms is dead in the water.

[roundhill]

Does anyone know if we can provide the .apk to f-droid or do they need to compile the source themselves? We have some API keys and whatnot that we can't include in the source.

[andreyrd]

I believe they have to compile it themselves to include it in the main repository.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#adding-a-new-app

[roundhill]

Hmm, we might be out of luck then. The app does compile and run from the source, but it uses a sample Simperium app id that doesn't support production Simplenote accounts, so things like sharing and publishing don't work. I don't think we'd want to ship an app that only half works to f-droid.

[alexanderadam]

@roundhill the lifecycle of an application is obviously longer than just 'downloading and installing' once. 😉

Users want updates too and being available in the official F-Droid repository allows users to be sure that at least no closed components are used.
Besides from that, people looking for OSS on Android are most probably looking in F-Droid.

But I would guess that the Simperium thingy makes things really complicated here.

[IzzySoft]

To get it into the official repo, F-Droid must be able to compile the app completely from its source – i.e. no blobs or proprietary libraries (which includes GMS) are allowed.

Meanwhile, the app is in my repo – but I am only able to keep it up-to-date if the APK files are attached to their corresponding releases. That was last time with version 1.6.3 – since then, no APKs anymore (up to 1.6.6). So if @roundhill (or anyone else from his team) could keep up attaching it there, that would be much appreciated.