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Comment by comradesmith | Hacker News Reader

Installing f-droid and using more simple and open source apps is one of the best things I've done lately.

Its too bad its still flakey at updating apps. I've been using it for a few apps for many years, and I'd say easily half of app updates simply fail for non-obvious reasons. Its been this way across multiple devices and countless versions of Android, so I'm left to believe the problem is with F-droid itself.

I also heavily heavily hate the idea that they sign everything, the app stores must not be trusted. They should only be signing over packages already reproducibly compiled.

Why? Isn't that how signatures of any Linux distro work too? The packager signs the package not the developer.

Because they force users to trust them unnecessarily.

What are you expecting them to do, not host non-reproducible builds at all? Android will not run unsigned apps. This would result in F-Droid having exactly 3 apps. They're working on getting more reproducible builds but the build system is not exactly great for it.

> What are you expecting them to do, not host non-reproducible builds at all?

Yes.

Well you can start your own F-Droid repo only hosting reproducible builds and build them yourself. It is a very large amount of work which is why it's happening so slowly.

I've had problems with YALP store suddenly being unable to find su and then no longer working. F-Droid is in the same boat where it gives you the choice of a few different methods to install apps, because it's still trying to find where it fits in.

IMHO that place is sideload as system app when you first install the OS. Which was my solution to the YALP issue.

(YALP store is not on my actual phone - that only has F-Droid)

and if you can avoid apps altogether and use their website instead, it is often better.. because they don't get as much power over your device.

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