F-droid repos inaccessible on old Android

1

I have an old Samsung Galaxy Ace 3 and I wanted to install F-Droid on it without resorting to a custom ROM (stock/latest Android version is 4.2).

I downloaded the 4.x-5.x apk, copied it over and installed it. This is where I started having issues.

The issue was that trying to update the official repos caused issues. I wanted to fix this by installing the root certificates, HOWEVER the device in question refused to install them the normal way (did not see any certs in the SD card) so I resorted to rooting the device and installing the certs manually.

This did not fix the issue (complained about incorrect signature), and neither did any other attempts, including forcing the legacy XML format (complained about invalid digest for something in META-INF).

Strangely enough, the Guardian Project repostories work perfectly fine, so I have no clue what could be the culprit.

2

I can confirm that the root certificates successfully installed (I installed multiple) because they show up as system certificates in Settings. No clue why it didn’t let me install it normally and why it couldn’t see any certificates, but at least they are installed now.

3

did not see any certs in the SD card)

so you’ve read Let’s Encrypt ISRG Root X1 and Privacy Browser – Stoutner and “Android expects the file to end with a .pem. The default file name will be isrgrootx1.pem.txt, so you will need to change it to be something like isrgrootx1.pem.” made sure the file extension is ok? else it will not be visible for import

4

I did that too. I put the files in a folder (since I wanted to import multiple root certs) on the root of the SD card so it looked something like this:

/storage/extSdCard/certs/isrgrootx1.pem

This did not work. I put the certificates themselves in the root of the SD card and that did not work either. I put them literally everywhere and the phone could not find it. I still don’t know why it did not work, although I’ll try again tomorrow.

5

I have exactly the same problem. Old tablet running 4.2.2. Using recommended 4.x-5.x f-droid apk version. Let’s Encrypt root certificate installed successfully. When trying to update the f-droid repositories the app complains of incorrect signature. Guardian repositories work fine. Could this be a TLS version issue? @kooper any update on this for your tablet?

6

I also have this problem with the official android fdroid-app with my old android-4.2 Tablet.

Workaround: download and install app via a webbrowser. I use F-Droid Archive Repository for this

7

Yeah, chicken and egg, old Android needs apps from Archive., Archive is too big to be processed by old Android devices or they can’t even connect.

8

with Android 5 could not get file index always happens (even with F-Droid Classic Client it still fails), i had experienced it with my Android 5 VM on my moto g54 5G with Virtual Master, i cannot get F-Droid to work