Ideas to help users find apps

#1

Hello,

Ideas to help users discover applications based on popularity seem to either be difficult to implement or find resistance because of privacy issues.

Here are some ideas to ease discovering applications with the F-droid client in other ways, I don’t know if they have been discussed previously, nor how hard to implement they are (not a programmer, sorry).

“SORT BY” EVERYWHERE

Alphabetical and Last update are the only sorting methods now. Last update helps to find actively developed apps, but it is not available everywhere, if I see all the apps in a category, for example, I get an alphabetically sorted list and no other option is given.

How would it work?

  • The user can choose the sorting method in every list of apps in the client.

HIDE APPS

Some apps are useful only in certain parts of the world, to speakers of certain languages, require something external I don’t have… It would be nice if the user could choose to hide individual apps in the client to improve the signal to noise ratio.

How would it work?

  • Hidden apps are only shown in the list/screen “hidden apps”, accessible maybe through the main menu.
  • Hidden apps don’t show in “Latest” or “Categories”
  • In a search they appear at the bottom as “hidden” (or don’t appear at all?).
  • Perhaps it shouldn’t be possible to hide an installed app?

BOOKMARK APPS

You might want to track certain apps but not install them yet, not to forget apps mentioned in a long article that you won’t install right now for reasons, or you are waiting for announced features that will make it usable for you…

How would it work?

  • Bookmarked apps appear in a screen/list “Bookmarks”.
  • You get notifications for new version of bookmarked apps, similar to notifications of updates for installed apps
  • Hidden and bookmarked are mutually exclusive.

PERSONAL TAGS

Categories are only useful to a certain level, a user’s mental map could be different. A tag would be something personal like “Trip to Berlin” to add maps, public transport tools, photography apps, translation tools…

Tags can substitute “bookmarks” if the user (can) get notifications for upgrades of tagged apps not installed yet, and “Hidden” could be treated as a special tag perhaps, to have it everything together in one place.

Greetings.

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#2

I like these. To further add to this though, it would be nice to be able to list/search just by one specific repo (if more than one are added).

Also kind of related. When adding a new repo it would be nice if just the new repo updated rather than ALL the repos (can take a while if there are many.)

I’m also not sure if it would work in the Play Store/Amazon App store/others, but it would be nice if it were there for exposure, though I realize this is highly unlikely since most app markets probably have rules about adding “competition”.

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#3

I like the keyword/tag-cloud approach for github sourcecode repositories called topics

beside fdroid category an app can also have up to 20 app-developper-defined topics that are displayed as buttons in the app description. if a user taps on a topic button he gets a list off all apps that have the same topic and therefore allows to find something similar.

the topics should be read from a textfile in the sourcecode repository during fdroid app build process.

technical this can be merged with @Osoitz-s “personal tags” so there are app-developer tags and fdroid-user-tags.

From my point of view fdroid-s static “Categories” are not flexible enough . i.e the category multimedia as more than 100 apps from audio (noice generator, mp3 player, muscal instrument), picture(drawing app, photo management, camera app) and video

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#5