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Amaze File Manager disabled on Fdroid

Open YamiYukiSenpai opened this issue 5 years ago • 38 comments

Currently Amaze is disabled on fdroid for the reason that it's using a few proprietary libraries. This issue is focused at providing an alternative / removing those libraries so that fdroid servers can build Amaze File Manager


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YamiYukiSenpai avatar Sep 16 '19 21:09 YamiYukiSenpai

This. Why is the F-Droid version so behind in updates?

F-Droid version: 3.3.2

Play Store version: 3.3.4.79

ghost avatar Sep 21 '19 07:09 ghost

Hello want to know when will be updated the F-Droid version too.

NishaYume avatar Sep 23 '19 19:09 NishaYume

It should be automatically updated...

EmmanuelMess avatar Sep 30 '19 02:09 EmmanuelMess

The newest F-Droid builds fail because they detect cloudrail in the build.gradle file. Which is strange, I believe it has been there before as well...

flocke avatar Oct 02 '19 05:10 flocke

Perhaps cloudrail has been blacklisted by F-Droid in the meantime? I too am looking forward to this getting resolved. For reference, here's a link to the latest fdroid build log: https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/com.amaze.filemanager/lastbuild

ravilov avatar Oct 02 '19 09:10 ravilov

Opened an issue with fdroid, hope they give a solution to this.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/issues/1817

VishalNehra avatar Oct 02 '19 10:10 VishalNehra

@VishalNehra Cloudrail was indeed blacklisted since the last amaze update. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/commit/b3754af137761b6cd427601a9131ea033199c4d4 The library itself was discontinued though, and cloudrail now focuses on something completely different (I dont know if cloudrail blacklist is connected to this or not). As per F-Droid's policy, all libraries should be open source too, and if it was included before it was probably overlooked, or the library wasn't proprietary.

Is it possible to remove cloudrail for f-droid build flavor?

ClockGen avatar Oct 22 '19 13:10 ClockGen

Is it possible to remove cloudrail for f-droid build flavor?

I think we need it to connect to the cloud.

EmmanuelMess avatar Oct 23 '19 18:10 EmmanuelMess

CloudRail now entirely focuses on connecting industrial sensors to AWS, Azure, Google IoT and many more to realize IIoT projects.

@EmmanuelMess ...I don't see an issue with a F-Droid version that can't handle clouds.

licaon-kter avatar Nov 01 '19 12:11 licaon-kter

I personally barely use cloud storage at all, none of which through Amaze, so I don't think I'd care too much if the functionality was gone from the F-Droid build. :)

Alternatively, we could try and find a free replacement lib with the same or similar functionality. I'm sure there's at least something out there.

ravilov avatar Nov 01 '19 13:11 ravilov

Maybe we should create our own fork, instead of adding more differences between the Play and FDroid versions.

Edit: Where is the cloudrail source?

EmmanuelMess avatar Nov 02 '19 15:11 EmmanuelMess

Edit: Where is the cloudrail source?

Nice try, from what I see it wasn't a FOSS thing so no joy.

Yes, F-Droid trusted that maven repo to include only FOSS libs but that's was not an actual requirement.

licaon-kter avatar Nov 02 '19 16:11 licaon-kter

Not sure if it's related, but fdroid is warning about the source code not being available:

This app has features you may not like: NoSourceSince

andersonvom avatar Nov 17 '19 17:11 andersonvom

@andersonvom yes, related, there's no source that F-Droid can build from only FOSS components (this source and its dependencies)

licaon-kter avatar Nov 17 '19 18:11 licaon-kter

Update: last release on FDroid is now 3.1.2 RC1 (2yrs old, and there were 4 release candidates for that version).

EmmanuelMess avatar Nov 19 '19 21:11 EmmanuelMess

Switched to https://github.com/zhanghai/MaterialFiles Unsubscribing

532910 avatar Dec 13 '19 11:12 532910

@EmmanuelMess ...I don't see an issue with a F-Droid version that can't handle clouds. [@licaon-kter]

I must say I second this. AntennaPod (which I'm active for) also had disabled one feature as a library was not FOSS. I'd rather have Amaze in the default F-Droid repository without cloud support than not have Amaze at all (I don't care for cloud support as I don't use it).

Maybe we should create our own fork, instead of adding more differences between the Play and FDroid versions.

Is an option indeed, but it might not be great for discoverability for potential new users.

keunes avatar Dec 22 '19 22:12 keunes

Is it possible to remove cloudrail for f-droid build flavor?

I think we need it to connect to the cloud.

To which cloud?

Cloud support per se does not have to mean you have to get proprietary, as there are open source cloud implementations, Own Cloud for instance.

If this library is just used to access one specific, proprietary cloud, could this feature be separated into a plug-in that than will get "blacklisted" on F-Droid, but still available on the Play Store? I guess the entire cloud software accessed here is not avaible on F-Droid, so it would do no harm to separate its access into a plugin...

If it is just to have a cloud option for Amaze users, then I guess Own Cloud might be sufficient...

Also, I just followed the thread about WHY Amaze got blacklisted, because it uses CloudRail. There I found that CloudRail is also discontinued! I would say that for security reasons Amaze should NOT rely on cloud code that does not get security updates. That could become a security threat in the future. And if the proprietary cloud that should have been accessed by Amaze happens to be Dropbox, in this discussion there is mention of an open source SDK for Dropbox.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/issues/1817 https://github.com/dropbox/dropbox-sdk-java

Update: About the CloudRail Universal API: https://developers.cloudrail.com/universal-api/ "This product has been discontinued as of March 1st 2019."

hman2 avatar Dec 26 '19 14:12 hman2

F-Droid version: 3.3.2

Maybe I'm blind but I'm not even seeing that... On the website the last version seems to be from 2017:

https://f-droid.org/packages/com.amaze.filemanager/

Hence why it also has the NoSourceSince Anti-Feature

mihawk90 avatar Jan 02 '20 02:01 mihawk90

@mihawk90 Yes, we went back to the last version that was entirely FOSS, is that old? Maybe...

licaon-kter avatar Jan 02 '20 02:01 licaon-kter

Ah well, must have overlooked that above. Thanks

mihawk90 avatar Jan 02 '20 21:01 mihawk90

Cloudrail indeed is outdated, but the APIs seem to be working fine till now. And the plugin is generating revenue for us. Creating a separate flavour for fdroid will require lots of codebase changes, basically a copy of each and every file. It's simply not worth it. As for using only open source cloud services sdk, we do not currently have any time/resources to work on the same.

VishalNehra avatar Jan 05 '20 20:01 VishalNehra

I don't know anything about coding, but gradle flavours seemed to be the solution for a similar (free/non-free/F-drod) issue with AntennaPod: https://github.com/AntennaPod/AntennaPod/issues/1959 Maybe that could be a solution for Amaze as well (?)

keunes avatar Jan 06 '20 15:01 keunes

Why not create an AmazeFileManager repository for fdroid?

wuniversales avatar Jan 09 '20 14:01 wuniversales

@keunes we've been using gradle flavours in past (G+ profile picture for nav bar feature), but in this scenario, we'll have to practically maintain identical file for almost whole source code in fdroid flavour. Would be very difficult to maintain.

VishalNehra avatar Jan 09 '20 15:01 VishalNehra

Hi,

I've been reading a little bit about all this thing and i would like to know what's going to happen, i jut got tired to have the old Amaze File Manager 3.1.2 RC1 (the latest version available on F-Droid, which is almost 3 years old), and i just installed the latest version today (3.4.1) because i couldn't even install the APKs from Amaze, really limited options, etc.

I read (if i remember correctly at the GitLab discussion/issue dedicated to this), that the Amaze File Manager developer team would be developing a home made implementation of the cloud library that's causing all the mess (i suppose that would be FOSS, of course), and if i could know what about the status of it.

Thank you very much for your great efforts and work, i really love this fantastic app, to me (excepting for the limited to pay version cloud features), the best file manager (FOSS) for Android by far.

Bests ^^.

TakuyaSama avatar Feb 01 '20 22:02 TakuyaSama

@TakuyaSama yes it's currently being developed. Last I heard from @EmmanuelMess Onedrive was done (except upload). You can join our Telegram channel to stay updated https://t.me/joinchat/NNFgWxQUB8fFE3yCsC0w4g

VishalNehra avatar Feb 05 '20 13:02 VishalNehra

So basically, what I see is, Amaze is leaving things out and not going for FOSS fully? Find it very hard to digest as well tbvh.

vdbhb59 avatar Feb 14 '20 14:02 vdbhb59

So basically, what I see is, Amaze is leaving things out and not going for FOSS fully? Find it very hard to digest as well tbvh.

We are working on creating a library for cloud connection, until it is done, no new FOSS version will be available.

EmmanuelMess avatar Feb 14 '20 21:02 EmmanuelMess

Why not create an AmazeFileManager repository for fdroid?

Yes, or on IzzyDroid : https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/ https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info

IPv777 avatar Jun 30 '20 18:06 IPv777