Translating a lot of app summaries I noticed that contents of them are frequently poor in information. That’s because many devs insert some unneeded matters of course instead of feeding these short 80 characters with relevant data.
So, dear devs
don’t repeat your app’s name in summary, it’s written just above and therefore already known!
don’t confess that “it is an app” or even worse “an application”, what else in an app store!
forget that it’s " for Android ", otherwise it wouldn’t be on F-Droid!
I totally agree! It would be great to see improvements there! The summaries that are included in the fdroiddata collection were almost always written by fdroid contributors rather than the upstream dev. So I think we can consider those “ours” to edit, rather than upstream source code to leave as is.
looks good! I think you might able to make those edits in Weblate, otherwise via merge requests to fdroiddata. You can edit the files directly in gitlab, if you don’t want to use git.
Another rule to have would be no advertisement. VLC being a bad example currently, claiming to be the best app in its category.
A lot of apps state they are easy, and simple, etc. which doesn’t explain a whole lot.
Summaries should explain what pain point the app solves for the end user. Users know their use case and some constraints on how to solve the problem: they will scan for that.
Some examples:
FairEmail - Fully featured email client. Neat, Intuitive user interface. Privacy friendly.
VLC - The best video and music player. Fast and “just works”. Plays any file.
BusyBox - Complete set of basic Linux command line utilities. Many utility apps need it.
Etar - The basic Android calendar, in material design.
EDIT: See critdroid’s post for the links, I can’t yet post any.
EDIT2: 80 character limit
@kingu Correct spelling of filename extensions in English remains a mystery, see e. g. “Document Viewer”. But thx for the hint.
I agree with you that VLC’s self-congratulatory statement is questionable and affirmations of ease and simplicitiy are rather meaningless.
@eckfw Nice examples as a basis! Sadly three of them would fail because they are too long. Summaries are limited to 80 characters.
I’m also in general against pointless self-promotion, like “the most amazing” but I think VLC can claim to be “best open source video and music player”, I would be OK if that dropped “open source”. VLC has done an amazing job IMHO, even though it is a massive pain in the ass to build, and working with the upstream can be strained at times.
Fix multiple crashes due to Kotlin migration, fix onboarding started when ML is already set up, fix crash when no brightness setting is found, fix crash in player option when no chapter is found and translations update
What about noob search on our beloved vlc android - Google Zoeken ? I wonder which tags Google indexes for F-Droid.
Your release from 2019-05-19 is available on the client but not (yet) on the website which got its last update on 2019-05-17. Therefore you get a 404Error at the moment.
On topic:
I’m not sure if it’s constructive to get wound up in popular unique examples like VLC which are already best known by everyone.
My point was that there are hundreds of apps nobody knows and for those I expect that they are telling me within these short 80 characters what’s their main purpose, if it’s worth to get more information and open the description or page forward. So in summaries:
Iteration of the app title in the summary is a no-go in all cases
“App”, “application”, “Android” are almost ever superfluous.
“Easy”, “simple”, “light(weight)” tell us all and nothing.
Even “free” and “open source” are pointless on F-Droid, that claims to be a FOSS app store.
All these terms can be used in description as often as wished but should be avoided in summaries where they only spend space.
Since F-Droid don’t have any action with Google search engine (?) , I wonder how Google indexes fdroid pages: having apk + android + download in top could help friendly noobs landing on F-Droid (?).
Since these 3 are displayed at the end of page , your suggestion will be fine if
This version requires Android ? or newer.
It is built and signed by F-Droid, and guaranteed to correspond to this source tarball. Download APK
could be moved to the top of description (?), where Google AI seems to target fdroid pages for indexation.
btw, I wish that the users of the forum could plebiscite the advantages of OpenFoodFacts with their friends : it’s a shame that many are using bloated rebrands instead of original…
…and even more than VLC, it could (like Fennec) be a flagship for F-Droid.
