An option to disable 'The Latest Tab now highlights good descriptions'

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).

1 Like

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.

1 Like

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.

1 Like

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.

1 Like

https://www.reddit.com/r/fdroid/comments/c68kmv/how_to_find_latest_apps_added_in_fdroid/

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.


source: https://gitlab.com/oF2pks/fdroidclient/commit/0049a1f2342d9ccdb28e9f685fa4fb136557d23e

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.

I wonder if there should be an option:

Show apps in list (classic) view: false (default)

For example, by using fdroid-client: not only end users (guilt of effortless ?) of F-Droid client are not aware of latest new Screenshot Assistant addition, but moreover, they are never made aware they could help/contribute with missing metadata on Gitlab.

I guess Privileged extension won’t be compatible with such fork, maybe done via official Nethunter-client could do the trick ?

(Hope it’s not going against F-Droid propriety …)

1 Like

fdroidclient cannot be all things to all people. The core design idea for fdroidclient is to ensure that any Android owner can use F-Droid, so yes, it needs to remain simpler. That means keeping the list of Settings as short as possible.

Any app can be supported by its own Privileged Extension by doing a trivial fork of F-Droid Privileged Extension and making a release.

How is this? Is it really considered as solved / wont fix?
Please don’t tell me that F-Droid is unable to listen to it’s own users and contributors.
Did anyone outside the core team say that hiding apps is a good idea? I haven’t seen that.
I don’t want to be harsh because I appreciate a lot the work that’s being done, a work that I can’t do myself, but can’t you accept that also you sometimes take wrong decisions? Or at least decisions that should be optional and not imposed to all?
Don’t you see that the abundance of forks of the client is an indicative of something?

This project is too important to be driven stubbornly.

It’s not hidden since you can’t just show 2000 apps just to be fancy in a big scrolling screen.

Also, you’d hit the other complains, like lack of changelogs and screeshots.

Privileged Extension can be used for any app, it just needs to be a custom build to support that app’s signing key.

@hans with both official and my “unleashed” debug version, I noticed my 2 days old jQuarks update doesn’t appear in LatestTab on [EDIT: non-US devices].

canceled

tablets (but ok via search), despite showing well with phone devices; did I missed any tablet’s specifics in jQuarks metadata/description ? (tablet landscape screenshots ?).

you onl y need one screenshot to qualify, as far as I remember

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.