Publishing app on F-Droid.

[DavHau]

Would the eclair mobile team consider publishing this app on the F-Droid app store? I think nowadays there are a lot of good reasons to not have the google framework installed on ones phone (and therefore no play store is available). Especially in the crypto scene i think there are many people who don't use google apps. Currently the only way left to install the eclair mobile app is to manually download it from github. Therefore we have no automatic updates for example. I think it would be great to publish this app properly for the FOSS community also.

[dpad85]

Hello, I agree that it would be great to not depend so much on Google tools especially for the app distribution.

From the F-Droid inclusion policy however:

For software to be FLOSS, the software in its entirety must be so - including all libraries and dependencies used. Additionally, it must be buildable with only FLOSS tools. We cannot build apps using Google’s proprietary “play-services”. Please talk to upstream about an untainted build flavor (either using microg or removing non-free dependencies completely).

Sadly we do have dependency to Google play service, due to the Channels Backup to Google Drive feature. So we would first have to provide an "untainted build" and I've yet to see the impact it would have on the app.

[LilChange]

Sadly we do have dependency to Google play service, due to the Channels Backup to Google Drive feature.

Indeed is sad about F-Droids rules that make it difficult for ppl trying to #opt-out of surveillance. The strictness makes sense, but the result is all or nothing reality. I can manage to manually download eclair-mobile, verify the hash and check the fp. It's just time consuming to do every month or so for X number of apps. To alleviate this for all of us non-G00G users, the @ACINQ team could do these easy to follow docs to self host an F-Droid repo:

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Setup_an_FDroid_App_Repo#Real_World_Setup

It would be great to see an F-Droid repository called non-free like Debian that hosts a bunch of projects like Eclair so users only have to add and enable one repo.

[ghost]

There is also option to just create and maintain own F-Droid repository. Many apps are doing it (NewPipe, GuardianProject, Samourai, ...)