Procedure to take over an app as new upstream?

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Dear people,

I am a user of the application RehearsalAssistant (an audio recording application) and it was designed for very, very old Android versions, to the point that, when I started using it on my Android 7 system, the context menu that was supposed to appear on the screen appeared only at the very, very bottom of the screen, with only upper left corner visible, totally unuseable.

Since then, I posted a message on sourceforge telling that I intended to fork the project, forked it on github and started making bazillion modifications.

The app has really bad code and it is serving me as a way to re-learn both Java and Android programming in general and I have been making great progress towards adapting it to modern coding standards.

So far, I have committed more than 130 changesets to the code and I would like to publish it on F-Droid.

So, what would be the best course of action/recommended way forward? The code is still crashing and I am fixing it as well as I can, but it lacks proper support for the Marshmallow-style permissons and many things more.

Please advise, so that I can make it a well prepared app for F-Droid.

Thank you very much,

Rogério Brito.

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Because it is a fork, I would recommend changing the applicationID (ie, com.example.app) to something new (recommended to use a domain you control). Then, when you feel it is ready, submit it as a new app to F-Droid. In the description you could mention it is a fork of the older app. You could also edit the description of the older app to indicate that a newer, forked version is available.

Basic instructions for submitting an app to F-Droid can be found at:

and:

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Yep, thats basically everything whats related to our side:

  1. Ask original upstream if you can take over the project.

  2. If declined or not-responding, change the applicationId.

  3. Ping us about the changed id/urls/whatever.