Hello everyone!
First of all, F-Droid is so wonderful, thanks to anyone and everyone involved! A little sliver of light in an otherwise bleak mobile device landscape.
Second, pardon my newb-freshness. If I’m missing something obvious, please send me the documents and I hereby commit to reading them in full, absorbing them, and not repeating my errors.
Third, and the point finally - Droid48 is a great piece of software, and the only information about why it’s not in F-Droid that I can find is here:
https://f-droid.org/forums/topic/droid48/
The topic seems unfinished, unless I’m missing something obvious. My question is: is there any way to move it forward? If so, I’d be happy to help with the work, or even attempt to do it all myself. I’ve a modest amount of free time, but some, and am willing to learn. If someone gave me a nudge or two in the right direction, I’d go for it.
Thanks very much!
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It requires a proprietary rom which cannot legally be distributed.
See if another repo will host it.
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Ok, I did a fair bit of reading here and investigating the github of droid48 to figure out what you mean, and I think I get it.
Droid48, while calling itself “an emulator”, is more like a “skin” or a “skin emulator”. Is that fair to say?
For some reason I couldn’t get my head around the fact that the project implements nothing of the software, and it’s just a massive proprietary ROM that gets downloaded.
I can’t figure out how exactly it downloads the ROM, or where from, but I could be missing something obvious.
How come HP don’t complain about their software licenses being abused? It seems fairly blatant. I guess the ROM itself isn’t stored on the Github, but if the code automatically downloads it from somewhere else, that seems fairly obvious regardless.
Thanks for replying anyway! I won’t find another repo to host it, as I simply won’t use the software anymore. I normally don’t use the Play Store for anything, and made an exception here because I was reading about the history of that calculator, and didn’t realise I was installing a big proprietary thing.
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Yep, you got it right.
The rom is included in the git repo and is included when the app is compliled.
HP probably don’t know about the app which is why nothing has been done.
The emulator is similar in concept to a video console emulator. It emulates the chips in the calculator.
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Where is the ROM stored? I’ve investigated, I’ve chatted with token-guessing bots about the problem and got them to help me analyze the repo, and the bots seem to think that the ROM is getting bundled with the APK during the installation process on the Play Store.
I’m still pursuing this, but only because I want to know now how the Play Store works - before I downloaded the Droid48 software, I looked all around the Play Store looking for information about what gets installed, and couldn’t see any information about proprietary stuff bundled in. I looked at the Github, and saw GPL licenses, and no mention of proprietary crap.
Now I’m being told - the Play Store bundled a massive proprietary blob into the download without telling me, and the developer doesn’t make it explicit either in the description of the app? What madness is this?
I really appreciate your help prodding me along here, thank you!
Tempted to go all the way here, I got this from the bots which has really sniped me:
If you installed the app from the Play Store, the ROM file should be present in the app’s private storage or assets. You could try inspecting the installed APK to locate the ROM file. Tools like apktool or similar can decompile the APK and reveal its contents, including any bundled ROM binaries.
Never used apktool, maybe now is the time.
I meant to say that this was very clear - an upgrade has been effected in my understanding of emulators. Cheers
I don’t know anything about building apks really but the bots don’t sound wrong. The rom will be somewhere in the apps private folders.
The GPL licence is a whole different issue. Probably the author intended their own emulation code to be GPL, but as the rom is also in the repo this leads to confusion.
Really what the author should have done is built an emulator with a user interface to provide the proprietory rom. Again, like a videogame console emulator being able to load games.
However this would have lead to people downloading a calculator app that didn’t do anything at all by default.