Got me my 1st aPhone and am learning it so I have DL’d F-Droid.apk to my computer and followed the verification instructions. Now how do I get it installed (I can copy it to one of the phone’s directories)?
PS. I tried the DL from the phone but got enough dotcom alerts to get out of there in a hurry and delete everything that was downloaded.
From my computer I created a 0 folder on the phone (I usually separate everything that I created in there from everything else).
But this zero folder was NOT visible in my phone so I copied the DL’s F-Droid.apk to ‘Downloads’ instead.
The Android file-manager is MyFiles (Warning: the icon is NOT a filing cabinet).
With MyFiles I opened the Downloads folder and clicked the F-Droid.apk icon …and went from there.
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Glad it worked out for you.
Why didn’t you download the APK with the browser installed on your phone directly into your phone? (No computer needed for that is what I am trying to say)
I did and I think it was with a googlish web-navigator but there were many, literally dozens of dot.com ads and similar security-related nuclear bombs going off all over the place so I shut the process down and fumigated the phone. The page I initially looked over when first approaching the (for me) brand new concept of F-Droid was obviously meant for computer downloads. From a security point of view, for someone who is new to a smart-phone, the computer approach is I think the only rational one even though I will have a dozen or two factory resets and re-tweaks done before I sign the beast off for release to line-duty.
When people compose help-files they often forget that those reading them are almost certainly brand new to the entire topic so the one thing you DON’T wanna do is explain how to land on Mars without first explaining how to get into Earth orbit. For me that was ‘sideloading’ a popoup balloon explaining what THAT is would have prevented me having to go look that up too before continuing.
No idea, in that environment it didn’t matter. Like I said, I am new to smartphones which means I don’t know what I’m doing and so nothing I can do on the phone can be near as secure as doing it via the computer (if that’s possible). A phone is like a gun, mishandle it and it will bite you in the behind; as far as I’m concerned if you don’t have complete control of your phone you shouldn’t be allowed with 50 feet of it.
"Like I said, I am new to smartphones which means I don’t know what I’m doing "
Same here, and unfortunately there is no simpleton’s guide to using them, but that is hardly a F-droid problem.
I never said anything about any F-Droid problem but the guide I followed (which had been composed for use on a computer whoever wrote it) could have said “you then use MyFiles which is the android file manager to click the F-Droid.apk installer you downloaded as per the above and thus begin the install”.
Note that the “files manager app” might have different names for different OEMs.
You mean different OS’es? I doubt that, but you could be right, Dolphin is a popular file-manager and although the user-god can give it whatever icon the user-god wants, as far as I know its stock or canned icon is the same on all systems.
I looked at he ‘apps’ (progs in my book) and was likely subconsciously looking for a filing-cabinet type icon instead of a meaningless bubble smear. The ONE or one OF very few things that Bill Gates did right was using a filing-cabinet icon for a file manager ever since when. This historical-precedent-level stroke of genius is still used in most OS’es and desktops, case in point being what “I” assign to my file-managers in all my systems (stolen from early KDE sets, root authority and responsibility being represented by red and a dangerous addition):
So there, yes I could have recognized MyFiles as being THE file manager icon but I didn’t …because a day or two earlier I didn’t even know if android was something to eat or to wear.
translation: Chrome-based browser
You could have opened the Downloads folder straight from the browser, which would launch the default File Manager (in this case, “Samsung MyFiles”.)
No idea what this means and would like to see screenshots.
–I think you mean: “I ran a virus scan because I saw popup advertisements”. You possibly did install malware from some place (or some garbage browser extension in Firefox) but it seems completely unrelated to the F-Droid web site and the application.
But simply using a computer does not guarantee better security; there are many variables.
If you are that concerned about security the obvious follow-up question is whether your copy of Android is a Google-free one. 
Precisely. “My Files” is the native file manager on Samsung phones; various others have been discussed in this forum and you can set the default to be whatever you want.
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