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Keep Android Open

Source: f-droid.org
1959 points by LorenDB a day ago on hackernews | 633 comments

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 20 Feb 2026, Week 8

F-Droid core

During out talks with F-Droid users at FOSDEM26 we were baffled to learn most were relieved that Google has canceled their plans to lock-down Android.

Why baffled? Because no such thing actually happened, the plans announced last August are still scheduled to take place. We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth, and having journalists just copy/paste Google posts serves no one.

But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issue… As time marches on people were left with the impression that everything was done, fixed, Google “wasn’t evil” after all, this time, yay!

While we all have bad memories of “banners” as the dreaded ad delivery medium of the Internet, after FOSDEM we decided that we have to raise the issue back and have everyone, who cares about Android as an open platform, informed that we are running out of time until Google becomes the gate-keeper of all users devices.

Hence, the website and starting today our clients, with the updates of F-Droid and F-Droid Basic, feature a banner that reminds everyone how little time we have and how to voice their concerns to whatever local authority is able to understand the dangers of this path Android is led to.

We are not alone in our fight, IzzyOnDroid added a banner too, more F-Droid clients will add the warning banner soon and other app downloaders, like Obtainium, already have an in-app warning dialogue.

Regarding F-Droid Basic rewrite, development continues with a new release 2.0-alpha3:

  • Updated Translations
  • Export installed apps list as CSV
  • Add install history feature
  • Add mirror chooser setting
  • Add prevent screenshots setting
  • Show tool-tips for all app bar buttons
  • Create 3-dot overflow menu for My Apps for less frequently used actions
  • Persist sort order of My Apps
  • Adapt strings according to Material Design 3 guidelines
  • Apply string suggestions (Thanks Lucas)
  • Fix missing icon bug in pre-approval dialog

Note that if you are already using F-Droid Basic version 1.23.x, you won’t receive this update automatically. You need to navigate to the app inside F-Droid and toggle “Allow beta updates” in top right three dot menu.

In apps news, we’re slowly getting back on track with post Debian upgrade fixes (if your app still uses Java 17 is there a chance you can upgrade to 21?) and post FOSDEM delays. Every app is important to us, yet actions like the Google one above waste the time we could have put to better use in Gitlab.

Buses was updated to 1.10 after a two year hiatus.

Conversations and Quicksy were updated to 2.19.10+free improving on cleaning up after banned users, a better QR workflow and better tablet rotation support. These are nice, but another change raises our interest, “Play Store flavor: Stop using Google library and interface directly with Google Play Service via IPC”. Sounds interesting for your app too? Is this a path to having one single version for both F-Droid and Play that is fully FLOSS? We don’t know yet, but we salute any trick that removes another proprietary dependency from the code. If curious feel free to take a look at the commit.

Dolphin Emulator was updated to 2512. We missed one version in between so the changelogs are huge, luckily the devs publish highly detailed posts about updates. So we’ll start with “Release 2509” (about 40 mins to read), we side-track with “Starlight Spotlight: A Hospital Wii in a New Light” (for about 50 mins), we continue to the current release in “Release 2512” (40 more minutes) and we finish with “Rise of the Triforce” delving in history for more than one hour.

Image Toolbox was updated to 3.6.1 adding many fixes and… some AI tools. Were you expecting such helpers? Will you use them?

Luanti was updated to 5.15.1 adding some welcomed fixes. If your game world started flickering after the last update make sure to update.

Nextcloud apps are getting an update almost every week, like Nextcloud was updated to 33.0.0, Nextcloud Cookbook to 0.27.0, Nextcloud Dev to 20260219, Nextcloud Notes to 33.0.0 and Nextcloud Talk was updated to 23.0.0.

But are you following the server side too? Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter was just released adding a plethora of features. If you want to read about them, see the 30 minutes post here or watch the one hour long video presentation from the team here.

ProtonVPN - Secure and Free VPN was updated to 5.15.70.0 adding more control to auto-connects, countries and cities. Also all connections are handled now by WireGuard and Stealth protocols as the older OpenVPN was removed making the app almost 40% smaller.

Offi was updated to 14.0 with a bit of code polish. Unfortunately for Android 7 users, the app now needs Android 8 or later.

QUIK SMS was updated to 4.3.4 with many fixes. But Vishal praised the duplicate remover, the default auto de-duplication function and found that the bug that made deleted messages reappear is fixed.

SimpleEmail was updated to 1.5.4 after a 2 year pause. It’s just a fixes release, updating translations and making the app compatible with Android 12 and later versions.

Removed Apps

5 apps were removed
  • Chord Shift: Shift plain text notes
  • OpenAthena™ for Android: OpenAthena™ lets common drones spot precise locations
  • Tibetan Keyboard: Keyboard for Tibetan script
  • Tibetan Pad: Read Tibetan script
  • Tomdroid: Note taker

Newly Added Apps

1 app was newly added
  • NeoDB You: A native Android app for NeoDB designed with Material 3/You

Updated Apps

287 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

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