Wondering if there is an easy way to find the target SDK of apps without downloading them first.
The target SDK defines which version of Android the app is designed to work with. Newer versions have extra privacy and security features which apps that target them benefit from.
I noticed that the Aurora Droid app lists the minimum SDK an app supports, but after looking a bit at the fdroid repository I couldn’t fins where it was getting this data.
We don’t take note of this. Open an fdroidserver and/or Client issue I guess.
You can use my repo browser for this in any web browser. On the app’s detail page, it lists minVer and targetVer for each APK.
Maybe not, but our index does – which is where my repo browser takes it from 
So: no issue with fdroidserver, just with fdroidclient then.
Oh nice!
Hadn’t noticed that you had a selection of repos that could be browsed. Have you ever thought about making a ‘mega-browser’ / all repos option, so all can be searched at once?
Any way to search by targetVer? Had a play with some different syntax in the search box, but couldn’t get it to return any results.
Looking at Your Guardian Project repo browser
and comparing it to their repo index
https://guardianproject.info/fdroid/repo/index.xml
I see they list <targetSdkVersion> for apps. I guess you are converting that to Android version for the app info page in your repo browser?
Nice to have some options for checking target SDK without having to install apps. Thanks for the pointers. I’ve added the info to the Android Security and Privacy wiki.
That’s not that trivial, but would be doable. Ideally by feeding all indexes into a database – or merging them in a way they retain their origin. Afraid to make this come true would require several full days of work – so without funding it’s not likely to happen anytime soon. I’d really like working full-time on projects like that, but I also have to make a living…
Not yet:
Guess I’ll have to create a separate “search page” to not bloat the list with all those filters. On small screens, it’s already bad enough now without adding more filters.
Exactly. Only devs speak SDK. Us mortals find that hard, and much better go by Android Versions instead.
Nice, thanks! Note that next to the (old) XML-Index there’s also the (newer) JSON v1 index available for several years now, holding even more details. Same location, index-v1.json or, if that does not exist (F-Droid eg seems to not hold it plain-text), index-v1.jar (which can simply be unpacked using unzip or any GUI to that).
You might wish considering to add my permission list at the permissions page as well. Like my repo, it’s bi-lingual (DE,EN).
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