Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one
Joined Aug 2019
When building software, I believe it is important to work in public. Software can give small groups of developers immense power over lots of people. Like how governments work in public and corporations have to be more public than private company, developers should be transparent not only with their source code, but also the discussions and processes while building it. This can be hard to get used to, but not bad once used to it. Great examples of this are #Debian #GitLab and IMHO #FDroid
Some #Android #SDK packages are updated with a revision number, but #sdkmanager does not allow installs to use that revision number. This sometimes breaks #ReproducibleBuilds. There is an issue open since 2017 about this:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/38045649
If anyone wants this feature, it should be easy to implement in #FDroid's sdkmanager:
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/sdkmanager/-/issues/26
For anyone who wants to relive the #Alphabet #DMAWorkshop the video has been released:
#DMA #compliance #competition #EC #EuropeanCommission #EU #gatekeepers #monopoly #mobile #Google #AI #GooglePlay #GooglePlayServices #GoogleFree #EDRi #FSFE #FDroid
A simple metric from #FDroid #metrics data: app downloads per week. Start with data from 1 of 2 servers for f-droid.org: http02, add hits for paths ending in ".apk". That gave about 2 million. Multiply by 18 (fronters + mirrors) and get ~36 mil app downloads a week.
import requests
hits = 0
r = requests.get(f'https://fdroid.gitlab.io/metrics/http03.fdroid.net/2025-05-26.json')
data = r.json()
for path in data['paths']:
if path.endswith('.apk'):
hits += data['paths'][path]['hits']
print('APKs', hits)
https://forum.f-droid.org/t/experiment-in-f-droid-org-metrics/32454
#Google funds this #EU think tank to put out policy papers saying #DigitalMarketsAct will break their lovely #PlayProtect scare screens, making us all less safe and "it require[s] Google to allow developers to insert links inside their Play Store apps".
https://ecipe.org/publications/eu-dma-undermine-security-mobile-operating-systems/#_ftn13
As I've always said in relation to the #DMA, let @fdroidorg compete on trustworthiness. I'd love to see this think thank include analysis malware rates of #CalyxOS with #FDroid and compare that to #GooglePlay #security
We're starting to implement support for split APKs in #FDroid. #Google wants to gather as much data about its users as possible, so trying to hide info about language, country, device specs was not a design concern for them. It is central for us. We want the official client to leak as little data as possible to any server, be it ours, mirrors, or custom repos. We welcome input:
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2963
#Android #APK #privacy #DataEfficiency #efficiency #technology #data #metadata
The first time I went to FOSDEM, I was constantly explaining what F-Droid was to people who never heard of it. I was introducing it and promoting it.
Second FOSDEM, people said "oh yeah, I heard of it, what does it do?"
Third FOSDEM, people said "I'm a user!"
Fourth FOSDEM, I listened to people tell other people what F-Droid is, and heard groups of people talking about it as the app store that everyone in the group had on their phone.
It has been quite a ride!
Joined Aug 2019
