Making it easier for F-Droid to package Mozilla Firefox

[nalexander]

@hans

@nalexander about Google Play Services, what is the push stuff used for? I never understand why Firefox needed its own push services. But I do understand why push requires GCM on Android.

This I can answer, 'cuz I built most of this integration for Fennec The Firefox product family wants push services to support the Web Push HTML5 spec. This is a big part of the Progressive Web Apps initiative that aims to make developing rich App experiences possible using the Web Platform. Firefox for Desktop runs its own custom push service called autopush that keeps long-lived Web Sockets open. As you surely know, that’s not viable on a phone – the OS is best positioned to do that work, potentially using side-channels from existing (carrier) channels. Therefore, Firefox for Android uses an autopush bridge to Google Cloud Messaging (and eventually will have to migrate to Firebase Cloud Messaging), and Firefox for iOS uses an autopush bridge to Apple Push Notification Service.

@hans

About reproducible builds, check out fdroid verify and our verification server:

Verification Server | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

The process is not well documented, but there are currently two ways to get APKs into f-droid.org via reproducible builds:

use fdroid signatures to get the APK signature from a release APK, then add that to fdroiddata

Binaries: field which has a link to the releases that f-droid.org reproduce Build Metadata Reference | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

Happy to help you try that stuff out. Perhaps that would be better in a new thread.

I concur, a new thread would be best for this. Let me try to get this --without-google-play-services business across the line before I get carried away and try to push on reproducible builds

Many thanks for this information, @hans.

Yours,
Nick