@smaragdus
If you don’t want any manipulation in searches, or set up your own, try G-Droid.
My view was, and still is, to promote how to avoid being taken off more prominently, so that it doesn’t happen, and everyone benefits as a result.
You will find censorship/tracking discussed more broadly
I think that tab should be renamed to highlights instead of latest now. So that the name is reflecting what’s displayed there.
How does one upload screenshots, and make the rest of the amends, so that this effectively never becomes an issue?
Convince app devs to host a fastlane structure in their repo, it’s the easiest way, specially since they can amend it at their will.
@Liacon_Kter is there a way to send out a mass information concerning this change? Send an e-mail, or have a bot make an issue in respective bug-trackers maybe?
Edit: Would it be a bad idea to have one repo per app that didn’t have this, with the possibility to upload screenshots from the client, only for app devs to fork it to their repo once aware?
Granted.
It could be done by having a field in the F-Droid app description light up red, and then explain it there?
I like to reiterate my down-vote to New apps eviction in fdroid-client, due to lack of /metadata : imho, it is totally going against F-Droid basics (:help wanted).
I’m also 100% against
Why ?, please, have a look to (nonsense distasty waste of time)
I feel this was hurried a bit too much too, specially since this part was shifted to the devs shoulders (upstream repo fastlane & etc), and we get little help from them in general if issues arise.
@oF2pks I’m also totally against not showing apps that are in the index in fdroidclient. All apps in the loaded indexes will always be visible in the search view. The Latest Tab has always been a limited view on the data, it has never shown all apps.
How do you search for the latest apps? The sentiment I have come across is that keeping on top of what new apps and updates there are, along with talking to people that use F-Droid is quite an important feature when there are no ratings in the client.
Instead of throwing options at it,
could non-compliant apps be given at-least less prominent placement in the Latest feed?
there is a little toggle button next to the search field. You can
either set it to sort alphabetically (A-Z) or by latest (the clock).
I would accept a merge request that put non-compliant apps at the bottom
of the Latest Tab. Even better, someone could implement “Recently
Updated” and “Recently Added” search chips in the Search View.
If it is accepted, I’ll also argue that this is not something that improves F-Droid’s quality.
There is a conflict between protecting users’ privacy and showing to the user the “best” apps in the catalogue, hiding some from the “latest” tab for not fulfilling some bureaucratic requirements doesn’t solve the problem, it just creates a completely different problem. There is no correlation between an app being good and it’s developer jumping through some loopholes that have been discussed in F-Droid’s Gitlab.
G-Droid has been mentioned, and it’s far from perfect, but I personally like some of the ideas, it’s certainly a better approach than removing things for petty reasons.
F-Droid, please turn the negative thinking in to a positive one, what you do is very important and we need you.
Yes, when I read about this new “feature” I was, too, a bit concerned, because, regulation creep may start to crowd out good smaller competitors.
Also what defines ‘good descriptions’. I actually agree that apps that take the time to make a description and screenshot, no matter their quality should be positioned above apps that don’t so long as the apps that don’t are loaded at the same time and presented below the apps with such.
I think that if an app is perceived to have a “poor/ugly description” we should, as a community, encourage and/or assist the app developer to improve the quality of the description (especially if the quality of the description doesn’t match the quality of the software itself! This is actually something that I am interested in doing myself, but not before improving the landing page of the website.
For me updating the quality of the website landing page takes top priority, I do feel that not enough people are getting on board with open source software and I believe it’s because it is perceived to offer a lower quality user experience. When I give someone a link to f-droid dot org, I kind of expect and want that person to get excited by the idea of open-source software without me having to explain why it’s so great. I think the actual website is failing to stimulate the interest of people that I talk to online. I could be wrong. Anyway I don’t want to hijack this thread with that discussion, if you are interested I recently opened a thread for this.
Secondary to my interest in improving the landing page is to improve the user experience of the app itself. One of the main gripes that I have is that you don’t know when you are at the top of the “Latest” page. I OFTEN find that I am accidentally triggering the repository update process. I have a plan to improve the “Latest” tab which involves a heading region at the top. I also want to have a small area of the interface dedicated to highlighting where in the world the app is downloading information/apps from, and how the files are verified in a decentralised way, with a link to possble information on how to setup a node/mirror(?). To me, these are more important right now than bringing in regulations. I also have ways to tweak the look and feel to present a more high quality product.
At this point in time, however I do feel that the most pressing thing is to get prospective users who access the website to become excited by the free and open-source aspects, and to download and install F-Droid in the first place, and that we need to be weary of introducing regulation creep that might favour entities with deeper pockets.
It’s not clear.
In Latest Tab, we have updates 2 months old, some recent and some of 2 years old!!
What is the condition to be in Latest Tab ?
For example, why didn’t you take the unique latest update of applications of last month (with a maximum of 300… items) ?!
What is the condition to be in Latest Tab ?
https://f-droid.org/en/2019/03/26/the-latest-tab-now-highlights-good-descriptions.html
Ideally all the apps would be there (eg. Like you see them when you press the search icon) if their metadata would be complete.
Here some screenshots from fdroid client with minimal modifications :
Like old classic : no pre-selection & linear vertical presentation without text description cuts.
Modern pre-selection BUT with all Latest* New (within 99 days & registration date):
source: previousLink + https://gitlab.com/oF2pks/fdroidclient/commit/21bc832dadf5b12772eb8d4f890c05988855ea29
@hans what will be great would be to use one of these for alpha builds only ?
@oF2pks looks nice, but serves a different mission than the default F-Droid client. You can maintain those changes on top of the F-Droid Basic flavor and add your fork to fdroiddata to be released.
