Comment by benrutter
2 days ago
This is pretty concerning, especially as FDroid is by far the largest non-google android store at the moment, something that I feel is really needed, regardless of your feelings about google.
Does anyone know of plans to resolve this? Will FDroid update their servers? Are google looking into rolling back the requirement? (this last one sounds unlikely)
I agree it’s a bit concerning but please keep in mind F-Droid is a volunteer-run community project. Especially with some EU countries moving to open source software, it would be nice to see some public funding for projects like F-Droid.
> please keep in mind F-Droid is a volunteer-run community project.
To, me, that's the worrying part.
Not that it's ran by volunteers. But that all there's left between a full-on "tech monopoly" or hegemony, and a free internet, is small bands of underfunded volunteers.
Opposition to market dominance and monopolies by multibillion multinationals shouldn't just come from a few volunteers. If that's the case, just roll over and give up; the cause is lost. (As I've done, hence my defaitism)
Aside from that: it being "a volunteer ran community" shouldn't be put as an excuse for why it's in trouble/has poor UX/is hard to use/is behind/etc. It should be a killer feature. Something that makes it more resilient/better attuned/easier/earlier adopting/etc.
The EU governments should gradually start switching to open source solutions. New software projects should be open source by default and only closed if there is a real reason for it.
The EU is already home to many OS contributors and companies. I like the Red Hat approach where you are profitable, but with open source solutions. It's great for governments because you get support, but it's much easier to compete, which reduces prices.
Smaller companies also give more of their money to open source. Bigger companies can always fork it and develop it internally and can therefore pressure devs to do work for less. Smaller companies have to rely on the projects to keep going and doing it all in house would be way too expensive for most.
3 replies →
>But that all there's left between a full-on "tech monopoly" or hegemony, and a free internet, is small bands of underfunded volunteers.
Always has been.
Apple has an iPhone app store monopoly, but Google is the bad guy here?
hogwash
Google has recently lost two cases against DoJ, keeping fingers crossed that Android will be divestituted.
1 reply →
Hope I didn't come across as criticising FDroid here- It seems sucky to have build requirements change under your feet.
It's just I think that FDroid is an important project, and hope this doesn't block their progress.
> Nice to see some public funding for projects like F-Droid
Definitely, SSE4.1 instruction set based CPU, for building apps in 2025, No way!!
Maybe if f-droid is important to you, donate, so they can buy newer build server?
I'm not quite sure if I'm over reading into this, but this comes across as a snarky response as if I've said "boo, fdroid sucks and owes me a free app store!".
Appologies if I came across like that, here's what I'm trying to convey:
- Fdroid is important
- This sounds like a problem, not necessarily one that's any fault of fdroid
- Does anyone know of a plan to fix the issue?
For what it's worth, I do donate on a monthly basis to fdroid through liberapay, but I don't think that's really relevant here?
You are right, my message comes through as too snarky. What I wanted to give is an actionable item for the readers here.
This has now become a major issue for F-Droid, as well as for FOSS app developers. People are starting to complain about devs because they haven't been able to release the new version for their apps (at least it doesn't show up on F-Droid) as promised
Is Westmere the minimum architecture needed for the required SSE?
Server hardware at the minimum v2 functionality can be found for a few hundred dollars.
A competent administrator with physical access could solve this quickly.
Take a ReaR image, then restore it on the new platform.
Where are the physical servers?
Zen 2 Epyc would barely double the price of older platforms if you buy an entire server, and would run circles around them.
7 replies →
Did and doing regularly.
> FDroid is by far the largest non-google android store at the moment
Not even sure it's in the top 10
I think we only know about F-Droid because it's the only high quality one.
Low quality software tends to be popular among the general public because they're very bad at evaluating software quality.
Wait really? What other ones are there!? Somebody's already pointed out Samsumg Galaxy store, but I don't think I know of others?
Edit: searching online found this if anyone else is interested https://www.androidauthority.com/best-app-stores-936652/
There are at least six Android app stores in China that have more than 100 million MAUs each: Huawei AppGallery, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi Mi Store (or GetApps), Oppo, Vivo, and Honor stores.
4 replies →
Amazon has a big one too. I also know of a popular one called Aptoide.
3 replies →
> Are google looking into rolling back the requirement? (this last one sounds unlikely)
That's apparently what they did last time. From the ticket:
"Back in 2021 developers complained that AAPT2 from Gradle Plugin 4.1.0 was throwing errors while the older 4.0.2 worked fine. \n The issue was that 4.1.0 wanted a CPU which supports SSSE3 and on the older CPUs it would fail. \n This was fixed for Gradle Plugin 4.2.0-rc01 / Gradle 7.0.0 alpha 9"
>FDroid is by far the largest non-google android store at the moment
Samsung Galaxy Store is much much bigger.
Funny true story: I got my first smartphone in 2018, a Samsung Galaxy A5. I have it to this day, and it is the only smartphone I ever used. This is the first time I hear about Samsung Galaxy store! (≧▽≦)
Largest not run by the corporations then ;)
Yup! I missed that one because I didn't realise it still existed. Woops!
why you read "google build tools cannot be built from source and it was compiled with an optional optimizations as required" and assume the right thing to do is to buy newer servers?
I'm not assuming anything, this is from a ticket for fdroid on google:
> Our machines run older server grade CPUs, that indeed do not support the newer SSE4_1 and SSSE3.[0]
I.e. the problem is because fdroid have older CPUs, newer ones would be able to build. I only mentioned it in terms of what the plans to fix might be. I have zero idea if upgrading servers is the best way to go.
[0] https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/438515318?pli=1