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Comment by aorth

8 hours ago

Cool! Unfortunately I switched to Obtanium a year or so ago. I get all my apps from GitHub releases straight from the developers now.

28 comments

aorth

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yjftsjthsd-h  7 hours ago

I use F-Droid precisely because I don't want that. When https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505229 happened - and when the same thing happens again in the future, because it will - I explicitly want F-Droid doing some basic due diligence on updates before shipping them to me. Cutting out the middleman is the opposite of what I want.

  • greeniskool  7 hours ago

    Counterpoint: I use NewPipe pretty much daily for watching YouTube. One day, YT introduced an API change that broke NewPipe, and so I patiently waited for an update.

    A few days passed, and I eventually get a notification from NewPipe prompting for an update. But I can't install it just yet, because of mismatching signatures between the F-Droid and GitHub versions (yes, that's the point, I know...). The F-Droid build took so long to release, that in the meantime, another version of NewPipe came out...

    • amlib  6 hours ago

      This issue happens to some extent within liunux distros too. I think specifically for youtube maybe it would be beneficial for a single core library that deals with the API and is shared by every single project that cares to interface with youtube. Rather than dozens of projects trying to chase youtube changes and overburdening repository maintainers, there would only be a single library whose updates would be fast tracked. This also requires there to be no embedding it in anything too, I don't know how feasible this would be on android/f-droid, but it kinda already happens with yt-dlp in linux distros, but yt-dlp isn't a proper library nor does it deals with all youtube endpoints that a proper youtube frontend would require.

      It would perhaps be nice if yt-dlp could eject it's youtube api handling into it's own project that is then augmented to handle anything youtube related and turns into THE library for dealing with youtube.. maybe even call it libyt :)

    • autoexec  4 hours ago

      I ran into the same issue. The good news is that app is the only one I've had to uninstall and reinstall from an apk because fdroid was so insanely slow. I wish they made an effort to keep up with apps where they need to be updated frequently and stop working entirely if they aren't updated. I can't imagine there are too many apps like that

    • yjftsjthsd-h  7 hours ago

      True. And especially for that use, I can imagine that the slow return around is actually a breaking problem. I think there are relatively few apps that need that kind of quick update, and I'm more concerned with malicious authors than that, but it would depend on precisely what you need out of your apps.

    • mintplant  5 hours ago

      I've never actually had this issue, for whatever reason. In-app updates to NewPipe (and the various forks) install just fine even if I originally downloaded from F-Droid. Not sure how that works exactly.

szszrk  7 hours ago

Do you use a lot of apps with that?

I tried it with 3 random apps for a while, but instantly got into issues. Two stopped updating due to Obtanium falling behind how app releases - for instance, developer changed version numbering scheme but Obtanium didn't expect that, so an outdated version was always presented. It wasn't fixed for quite a while.

  • aorth  6 hours ago

    I have 23 currently. It's surprising how fast it happened... I don't have any problems, but I don't pay much attention to it and apps seem to update automatically sometimes and after a manual refresh other times.

    • Gander5739  6 hours ago

      I've found Droid-ify more reliable at doing background updates, though it still only manages it sometimes (possibly due in some way to how I installed the apps). Hopefully Fdroid's app will be better at this.

fghkjlhb  7 hours ago

I tried Obtainium a while back and didn't like it too much, finding apps seemed difficult.

Then I discovered https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ which makes it very easy. I feel like Obtainium should make this more obvious. It would help adoption a lot.

pkal  7 hours ago

What do you do for apps that don't have GitHub releases?

  • s2l  6 hours ago

    The other way is to use fdroid as source within obtainium. The benefit is to maintain app list at one place, so you can export/import to another device, when needed.

  • asdfqwertzxcv  7 hours ago

    You can use it with non-github releases too, but it's super rare when one isn't available. In the case when Obtanium doesn't work, I just use F-Droid.

    • Aachen  5 hours ago

      Super rare? The government seems to release only on an obscure source called Play for some reason. I don't want to play a game, just to ride the transit system. There seem to be a lot of apps that don't release on such an addable source..

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