F-Droid 2.0

F-Droid 2.0 f-droid.org

After more than a year of hard work, we are thrilled to announce the launch of F-Droid 2.0, a complete redesign of the official F-Droid app and the largest a...

1463 points•daveoc64•6 days ago•416 comments•

#droid #complete #redesign #official #thrilled #app #hard work #complete redesign

416 comments

silverbluep6 days ago

I have been using droid-ify on GrapheneOS for a few years now; because F-Droid ui is terrible, and the privilege extention has been such a pain to configure and get working without issues on my previous lineageOS phone. Happy to see this major overhaul; and i'm glad the FPE is being phased out.

eighthave6 days ago

I think it is great that there are multiple clients out there, so people have a choice of user experience. One thing that I think is too often overlooked look is if they have implemented the same security and privacy standards as F-Droid, if that's important to you. For example, last I checked, the third party clients where still using index-v1, which is signed using SHA1. Maybe NeoStore updated to index-v2? And there is also quite a bit of effort put into the client-side to make sure it leaks as little as possible to the servers. There are libraries of the official core pieces for third party clients to use to gain many of these protections: https://f-droid.org/2023/05/02/three-client-libraries.html

adithyassekhar6 days ago

They could always close off access claiming ai scraping. If reddit shut their api down now instead of back then they could have also blamed ai and no one would’ve been mad.

PorciiVorbesc6 days ago

>I have been using droid-ify

After 10 years of F-droid, I'm bummed I only found droid-ify a couple of months ago. Sooo much better than F-droid.

TutleCpt6 days ago

Check out Neostore too. You'll love it.

BaardFigur6 days ago

There's also F-Droid Classic. For me Droid-ify never felt quite right + it never worked properly with unattended updates, for me at least.

epihelix6 days ago

Thank you. Used it to uninstall F-droid and roll back to v1 after trying out this new update (ooof... full-blown material ui is not for me. Those progress bars, oh my eyes!)

The old f-droid client made selecting app updates easy. With both v2 and droid-ify, you have to click through for each app. Not a great interface decision :( Why do updates always dumb interfaces down these days?

Squeeeez6 days ago

What do you mean by "click through for each app"?

Markoff6 days ago

Why limit yourself only to F-Droid when in APK Updater you can have APKMirror, Aptoide, F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, APKPure, GitLab and GitHub?

https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater

I don't really need app to discover other apps, I need app to install/update the apps I already know.

NSPG9116 days ago

agree, droid-ify is very clean, been using it for 5 years now

idle_zealot6 days ago

It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things. No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap, no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off. I'm willing to chalk some bad text alignment or uneven padding up to amateur designers working for free, but the design ethos on display, the thoughtless trend-chasing, is depressing to see.

doginasuit6 days ago

I've only seen the screenshots in the post, but those don't look confusing at all to me. A line between every section is not good or clear UI. I'd argue that grouping related entities by their proximity and leaving enough space in between sections is clearer. If you have to draw a line to make that distinction, they are probably too close.

idle_zealot6 days ago

In the case of the featured sections in the first screenshot, there should at minimum be a visual well indicating the horizontally scrollable strips. Invisible scroll panes are insane.

janilowski6 days ago

> It's sad to see F-Droid using the now-standard design convention of categorically refusing to draw lines between things.

Where exactly would the UI benefit from "drawing lines"? I'd say the visual hierarchy is rather obvious.

I'll say more: most separators people use in their UIs are completely unnecessary. They should be used sporadically when you don't have a better way of segmenting the interface.

> No visual differentiation between sections of the UI, no clear indication of what's tappable and what will happen on a tap

What section of the UI are you referring to exactly? From the screenshots in their blog post it seems to me like the visual hierarchy is preserved and without using the app at least I can form an immediate expectation as to the function of each button. (And what is clickable and what isn't)

> no indication of scrollable areas beyond content being cut off

What type of indication would you like to see here? I think most users intuitively understand that visual cue. An always-on scrollbar would introduce unnecessary clutter..

encom6 days ago

You would fit right in at Mozilla.

birksherty5 days ago

Only because devs and designers are making things so unrecognisable that people have to do that, or try to tap to see. Now those developers and designers think it is working. It's the other way what you said.

Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.

Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.

fugaziboutit6 days ago

User activity heatmaps over the last five years increasingly show that users often tap on things they want regardless of whether that word/graphic/icon has any outward indication of being interactive.

Of course the hottest of hotspots are always the high-contrast button-looking things, but I can understand the trend towards card-ifying or completely unwrapping touch targets given that users stab more freely than they used to.

newsy-combi6 days ago

Surely this should mean "debuff the design of the non-interactable elements (desaturate, shrink,...)" and not "crank up the interactable ones" or "make everything interact!"

Just like "customers keep running into our glass door" doesn't imply approval of glass and it doesn't mean you should turn everything into glass.

birksherty5 days ago

Many people I met everyday have to be given tutorials where to click in modern apps. I guess all these devs live in a bubble with other devs and make such comments.

Let's make everything a guess work and over many years forced people to learn to tap everywhere to do everything. Good game.

rom1v6 days ago

In addition to F-Droid on the device, I'd love an F-Droid "package manager client" on a computer, that allows installing apps on an Android device via adb:

    # update repo lists
    fdr update
    
    # upgrade all apps on the connected device
    fdr upgrade
    
    # search packages
    fdr search vlc  # lists org.videolan.vlc
    
    # install on the device
    fdr install org.mozilla.firefox
    
    # download the apk
    fdr download org.mozilla.firefox
    
    # uninstall
    fdr uninstall org.mozilla.firefox

Of course, all operations would verify the signatures first.

yjftsjthsd-h6 days ago

Like https://github.com/Hoverth/fdroidcl ? :)

temphaaa6 days ago

Can someone recommend a good F/OSS ebook reader on F-Droid? The existing ones I have tested have too many knobs and options and are not really user-friendly.... My wife started to get into reading, but I could not get her to get out of the Kindle/Play Books ecosystem because of the user-friendliness and easy synchronisation across devices that Kindle gives.

wingmanjd6 days ago

KOReader [1] is my favorite reader. Pairs well with my syncthing library of ebooks (I just keep the phone's copy in read-only mode).

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.koreader.launcher.fdroid...

ossusermivami6 days ago

Koreader interface with syncthing is not that user friendly to non techs, very powerful can do anything but i don't think i would advise that to non techie

archole6 days ago

Episteme is pretty good

https://github.com/Aryan-Raj3112/episteme

sporedro6 days ago

Just to add, KOReader might not look super use friendly at first, but I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s an amazing reader.

Once your used to it, the controls are a lot better than stock kindle as well imo.

OptionX6 days ago

To add to this, since the original comment mentioned kindle, you can jailbreak many of the models and install KOReader in them if you want to keep using the hardware.

tukunjil6 days ago

Using readera with network connection disabled. Super app.

AdManusMedici6 days ago

It depends.For me it’s not on app For a dedicated device(phablet/tablet) - KoReader. For Smartphone (no longtime reading) - Librera Reader

sfRattan6 days ago

KOReader is good, as others have mentioned.

If you want a cross platform option that's pretty good across Android/iOS/Mac/Windows/Linux, Readest[1] Is another great option. It supports syncing a library of ebooks and is licensed under the AGPL[2].

[1]: https://readest.com/

[2]: https://github.com/readest/readest

brnt6 days ago

I actually use MuPDF for epubs, as well as pdfs.

asnelt6 days ago

Me too. It seems to be the only one that does not litter the sdcard directory.

epihelix6 days ago

[Liseur](https://github.com/chmouel/liseur) seems nice, if epub is an acceptable format. It's available on F-Droid.

Supposedly it can interface with various sync providers, but I've not tried this myself. The rendering is lovely.

Accacin6 days ago

What I'm taking from this is that no one is happy about anything, ever. New design is fine. Old design is fine. I just want to search for an app and find that app, which is mostly what happens.

I appreciate all the hard work that goes into F-Droid <3

whatsThisBtn45 days ago

As someone who has upgraded OpenClaw and it has less capabilities due to security that I don't need for a VPS doing prototyping... I get the negativity when things change.

But fdroid is GOAT. They could make me hand type the exact app I want and I'm sure the app will be better than the ad ridden play store equivalent.

I let my kids have phones on road trips and I only installed educational games from fdroid.

No concern they will click buttons that are going to attempt to make a purchase or go to an external Web site.

Same story with guitar tuner apps.

They just work.

Pfeil5 days ago

This. But I indeed see some interesting features for me like better exploration and the difference between the list of updates apps and new apps.

It is really disappointing how much critique it gets, people complaining about stuff that has been bad for 15 years, but apparently the same people who were annoyed by it never contributed to fix it. I guess open source mentality is something else.

Also: while it is released, it is not yet marked as recommended. So I needed to upgrade manually. I assume they do this to get some feedback from early adopters. So I think people should either just wait or contribute.

31337Logic6 days ago

I came here to say this, and notice you already have. Thanks! :-)

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