New UI / UX of F-Droid app

1

Hi,
There’s no thread on the forum to discuss about all the modifications?
If not, here we are :slight_smile:
Screenshots

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2

There is now! Thanks for starting it. @pserwylo’s draft blog post is a good place to start: https://post--new-ui-fdroid-website-pserwylo.surge.sh/2017/04/04/new-ux.html

And that also points to a related effort: we are about to launch an overhaul of the website as well. The big UX changes will come more after the launch, since we’ll then have a nice workflow based on merge requests in gitlab.

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I really like the new UI. A few remarks since you ask :wink:
• A banner or logo of F-droid would be nice at the top of the main screen
• I would use different icons for the bottom bar. They don’t comply with the Material Design guidelines.
• Could we participate to add the screenshots?
• Some visual glitches but I guess you already know them and they will be handled in the next updates.

Thanks.

4

At the moment I find it far inferior to the old one.

  • In the “latest” page some apps are shown in a bigger square, some in a medium, some in a normal rectangle. Why, what’s the difference? In general space is not used efficiently.
  • The icon for the “big” apps is pixelated.
  • Space is wasted on the top. A search bar would be fine there.
  • There is no “recently updated” list.
  • The horizontal scrolling of apps in the “categories” page is not useful at all.
  • The “search within category” option is well made, but it’s not possible to add more categories.
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Whoa, what a change :anguished: !!! Some feedback:

  • I agree that having an fdroid banner or logo at the top would help during the transition, I was unsure weather I am still in f-droid or on some webpage first :-).
  • “Recently updated” is gone and was quite useful to browse over actively developed apps, it was great to discover new apps.
  • I agree that a lot of space is wasted at the top right now.
  • What is with the top app that spans over the whole breadth of the app? Is it a featured app? Is the Hebrew language pack for AnySoftKeyboard special in any way that it deserves this treatment?
  • There is no easy way anymore to see the list of categories. If you select categories you have to browse an awfully long list skipping lots of apps, just to see which categories exist at all. I would be happier if no apps would be shown and I could have a bare list of categories to choose from :slight_smile:
    All in all, I got so used to the plain and useful interface that this is quite different, but I can understand that you intend to become more “modern”.
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@Primokorn the best way to get screenshots, etc. into F-Droid is to have the apps include the screenshots, graphics, and descriptions via the two standard free software tools for publishing to Google Play: Fastlane Supply and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher. The new fdroidserver tools suite will automatically include them from the standard locations those two tools use. There are about 5-10 apps in f-droid.org that currently do this.

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  • The layout is visually interesting, and differentiates that screen from the others. If you want a list view, click on the search button.
  • f-droid will use high res icons as they are published via fastlane or Triple-T.
  • the Latest screen is currently the list of recently updated.
  • as always, the categories come from the server. Any repo can define whatever categories it wants.
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“modern” is only part of it. The most important part was to actually make the user interaction work a lot better, and be more intuitive for a broader audience.

9

I really like the new design!

Just a few things I noticed within the first seconds of using the new app:

  • Using the german language on Nexus 5 and LineageOS, the descriptions of the icons in the navigations do not fit
  • F-Droid crashes after bulk downloading updates and then install one of the new apps. Made a bugreport for that
  • Maybe you could be the first to show the new F-Droid features within the F-Droid app? I mean Screenshots, localized description, … This would help to give feedback
  • Swiping between the tabs is not possible. Personally I miss that but maybe that’s a design decision
  • On the update screen you only see a blank screen if all apps are up to date → It would be nice to show something like “All apps are up to date” and/or group the apps there like:

###Updates available###

  • App 1
  • App 2
  • App 3

###Up to date###

  • App 4
  • App 5
  • App 6

Thank you! I hope this can help you for further development.

10

Just added screenshots to the Guardian Project repo. Most apps in that repo now have some. Localized descriptions coming soon!

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I also would like to advocate for maintaining the Recently Updated list. Because so many apps in F-Droid are out of date or no longer maintained, it is really helpful to be able to see which apps have gotten updates recently. In fact, the majority of apps on my phone, I have pulled from the Recently Updated list.

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12

Can I open screenshots in full screen?

The button “install” looks bad in Russian.

Screenshot_20170411-220743.png1080×1920 271 KB

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It’s the same in German and perhaps other languages. Viewing screenshots in full screen would be awesome, I miss that, too.

14

Thanks everyone for all the detailed feedback.

I’ve created an issue for the following bugs to be fixed before a stable release:

Here is some feedback on some of the questions you had:

  • @Primokorn: “Could we participate to add the screenshots?”
  • Yes! but we are still working through the best way to do this.
    • @hans probably has more feedback on how this can be done.
    • I suspect it will involve submitting Pull Requests to upstream apps, putting screenshots in a well-known folder structure of their repository.
  • Regarding the “Recently Updated” list:
  • This is what the “Latest” screen is. It is a combination of recently updated and recently released apps. Newly released apps have the “New” tag on them. Apps are sorted based on the date they were updated. I encourage you to give it a little bit of a shot to see how it works after a few repository updates.
  • @bbrkr: “The “search within category” option is well made, but it’s not possible to add more categories”
  • I’d love to enhance this functionality in the future. There is a lot of scope for improving it so that, for example it auto completes category names as you type in the search, allows you to select multiple categories (as you suggest), etc.
  • @spaetz: “What is with the top app that spans over the whole breadth of the app?”
  • For apps which include a “Featured Graphic” in their metadata, they will display that in this location. As more apps include this in their metadata, it will provide a better experience for developers to show off their apps to end users. Right now because there is not a lot of metadata with feature graphics, we are using a dynamically generated artwork there instead for consistency (so the Latest screen always has the same layout). More info here.
  • @epinez: “Swiping between the tabs is not possible”
  • This was intentional, due to the Material Design guidelines.

Here is a list of things which were mentioned that have been fixed and which will be released in upcoming alphas (some in the upcoming 0.103-alpha2 and others in 0.103-alpha3):

  • @epinez: “Using the german language on Nexus 5 and LineageOS, the descriptions of the icons in the navigations do not fit”.
  • @epinez: “F-Droid crashes after bulk downloading updates and then install one of the new apps. Made a bugreport for that”. I think this is fixed, but could you please link to the relevant issue that you created?
  • @epinez: “On the update screen you only see a blank screen if all apps are up to date”

I’d love further feedback about these:

  • @Primokorn: “I would use different icons for the bottom bar. They don’t comply with the Material Design guidelines.” - Could you please link to the guidelines and explain in what way they don’t comply?
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15

When I compare icons from materialdesignicons.com or material.io with yours I have the impression that the F-Droid app is still using Holo Design. Maybe it’s just because I’m not used to see a description text under the icons.
That was my feeling when I opened the app for the first app.

16

Thanks for the quick response!

I made the bug report within the F-Droid app (via E-Mail) but I could not find a documentation where these bug reports are going to. Am I correct that they should be visible on Issues · F-Droid / Client · GitLab ? However, I could not find my issue there. I posted it on pastebin so that you or others can see if the bug is already on the F-Droid bugtracker or already fixed:

17

I don’t have any updates for 3-4 days. Is it just me? I tried to manually launch an update several times a day.

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I don’t have any updates for 3-4 days. Is it just me? I tried to manually launch an update several times a day.

This is not related to the new client.

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@Primokorn I just wrote up the first HOWTO for adding localized screenshots, graphics, and descriptions, getting app developers to include these would be the best way to contribute. We’ll probably accept pull/merge requests for adding these directly in F-Droid for a handful of apps that are very popular and the developer are unlikely to do it themselves, like Firefox, VLC, etc.

21

We did this UX Overhaul because there were so many workflow issues, that we figured we need to do a major overhaul since the overall structure was limiting the workflow. We were not interested in changing things were working. There was a lot of discussion and community input, you can see the overview of that here:

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/milestones/20

Some notable specific discussions are here:

@anon24191858 the dark mode is fixed, it’ll be in the next alpha