IzzyOnDroid is a repo compatible with F-Droid that has a huge amount of apps.
There are very interesting apps, such as Osm Go! that are not installable if the repo is not added to the client.
Even more, sharing an app link from that repo gives error to other users that do not have the repo added.
So the question/petition is: if there are already external repos such as Guardian Project, why not add also IzzyOnDroid by default, considering that it has many-many interesting apps?
Ahem… minor correction if I may: “Because most of those apps…”
Partially. Believe it or not, there are fully FLOSS apps in my repo where the authors explicitly stated they want them there, and not here.
True – and get removed once they reached “F-Droid proper”. Though many remain in my repo.
That said: Indeed quite a lot of apps don’t meet the stronger criteria at F-Droid.org – which is why they’ll never show up there. So I fully understand my repo isn’t included by default (we’ve discussed that before). Though: there could be a separate section in the “repositories” screen, stating something like “danger section” (with a short explanation), where such repos like mine could be pre-configured but not enabled by default. Not only mine – I also think of repos like Collabora, Bromite, Libretto…
Why not? Even Debian doesn’t hide its nonfree the way we hide 3rd-party repos
Speaking of “as usual”, my usual disclaimer: “I’m not an Android dev” And yes, it’s sometimes frustrating how long things just “hang around” – and again yes, I know we could need some more hands…
Several reasons, and I don’t remember which applies where:
we cannot build certain apps with our tools
authors complain it takes too much efford to get the build recipe ready
takes too long to get them in – and then, until updates appear
they prefer shipping their own builds for other reasons (and there are legit ones, like keys being required but are for good reasons not part of the code)