>I almost exclusively use FDroid, it's an amazing project. But I've never seen an app with so many issues
I've used Fdroid for years, downloaded and updated apps hundreds of times across multiple devices and never encountered a single thing you described.
Death, taxes, and people confidently generalizing from one-off cases of highly unusual experiences.
>I didn't realize the app was still being worked on.
By my count there have been three new updates to F-Droid just this year that were not alpha updates, and if you use F-droid these updates show up. If you use F-Droid, I don't know how you could possibly look at your app updates and not realize that is indeed being developed unless you're in the 99th percentile of highly unusual use cases. And if you're an unusual use case you shouldn't be generalizing from it.
> Death, taxes, and people confidently generalizing from one-off cases of highly unusual experiences.
I've used F-Droid for years and my experience matches the gp. I've read many reviews saying similar. Friends to whom I've recommended it have told me similar in person.
It seems yours is the highly unusual experience here.
Sure, and I have friends who use it who don't report these issues, and my subjective assessment of reviews is that this isn't the predominant experience being reported, despite your protestations to the contrary. The 'data' here is miscellaneous anecdotes from an internet comment section.
But let's just observe the claim that F-droid supposedly isn't being updated. You can see that F-droid is being updated if you... look at which apps are being updated. Is looking at which apps are updated also a 'highly unusual experience' ?
That didn't answer my question. F-droid gives you a notification when apps are ready for updates. And it lists these updates in the updates section of the app.
One of the apps that F-droid updates, is F-droid itself. F-droid has been updated three times this year. When it is updated, these updates are listed both in the notifications and the update section. Someone who claims that F-droid is not being updated is therefore an unreliable narrator.
This clearly shows, to anyone paying attention, that F-droid is indeed being updated, and I don't understand how your comment is responsive to any of this. It's only an internet comment sections that parent commenters experience "is normal and correct" without acknowledging or responding to any of this. This is important because it highlights the respects in with your comment in the parents comment lack of fundamental connection to objective reality and therefore are not reliable diagnoses of what is or is not happening with F Droid.
If looking at notifications in the app is something you're going to dismiss as an unusual experience, then you just don't know what you're talking about, and you shouldn't be positioning yourself as reporting on the normal case of what everyday users experience.
> Someone who claims that F-droid is not being updated is therefore an unreliable narrator.
It seems like you're trying to invent arguments to get mad at as no-one made this claim. The original commenter said two things, neither of which amounted to "F-droid is not being updated". They said:
1. That they "didn't realize the app was still being worked on" - this is just referring to their own perception of updates, not making any hard claim about actual work being done.
2. That it has "been years since the UI update" - this is referring to one specific large update a number of years ago, not to the small incremental updates since.
There's nothing else in their comment claiming lack of updates.
The main claim in their comment is that it's buggy, which can easily be true of an app with frequent updates.
Sure it answered your questions. F-Droid gets updates, but since the bugs in the UI and the core workflow persist it feels as if it does not get updates. The "normal and correct" references the issues parent reported - since I tested F-Droid on way more phones than is usual I can with absolute confidence confirm that those bugs do exist; to experience them is normal, the report is correct.
I installed an app with F-Droid yesterday. I went thought downloding, installing and came back to the app screen of F-Droid. The button was still "Install". What would normal users think, unless they already went through that many times? They would think that the installation failed and they would download the app again.
Interesting that you and gp both are not seeing Fdroid update itself. Sounds kind you must both be using a custom repository that excludes updates to the F-droid app, since you've both had that same experience.
I experience the >100% bug nearly every time I update Matrix Element (most recently yesterday). It’s happened regularly on my current phone and my previous phone. And yes, I do see F‐droid update itself, and I’m using only the default repositories.
I guess you have enough answers, but I agree with the others. It's a very, very buggy app. It does the important task that it promises so we all love it despite its flaws. But if this was a commercial app, the rating would probably sit somewhere between 1 and 3 stars.
And again, as I said to others, the idea that F-droid is not updating itself is almost self-evidently false, the issues people have reported with not being able to update apps involve some elementary conceptual errors that are being erroneously attributed to the app that have been explained by some comments here, and lastly subjective reports from people in a comment section are not a sound basis for generalization.
"Works on my machine" is not really a helpful response to someone sharing an issue they have. Are you implying that the parent is lying? If not, what constructive purpose does this comment have?
(I write this as someone who has experienced nearly every bug mentioned in this thread.)
>Worked on my machine" is not really a helpful response to someone sharing an issue they have.
When they're attempting to present their experience as the typical or characteristic experience, it is indeed helpful to contrast it against other experiences.
It's a helpful response, in that it indicates that it's not a universal problem, i.e. not a totally botched release, and may be worth debugging or submitting a report for.
I don't encounter all the same bugs gp does, but I do encounter several on a regular basis. These issues show up regularly on both my tablet and my phone, and they showed up regularly on my previous phone and two tablets over a range of ~5 versions of Android (8-12)
1. Every so often I turn on my tablet or phone and see a notification that fdroid has crashed, asking me to submit the information (I used to, I don't anymore). I wasn't using fdroid recently, I don't leave it open in the background; the only background task it has is fetching update lists and downloading new versions to install later. If it crashes, it loses the downloaded updates.
2. Occasionally fdroid crashes on start, providing the same notification as above. Force-stopping the app and removing the activity from recents is the only way to get past this--if I force stop and restart from recents, it crashes again. If I remove from recents and don't force stop, it crashes again. I'm guessing whatever parameters it launched with are causing the crash to happen again.
3. The background service frequently stops while updating package lists (not while downloading packages). The notification remains. This is regardless of whether the update is manual or automatic; there is no foreground update. At 11:00pm I regularly have a non-dismissable sticky notification, last updated at 5:00am, that fdroid is updating repos. Tapping it does nothing, I have to open the fdroid app, which may or may not crash on opening. If it crashes, the only way to reset the notification is to force-stop it. This is also the only way to open fdroid after such a crash (see #2). While I have no confidence that the crashing issue is fixed, it sounds like the new index is intended to prevent repo updates from taking this long. Personally, I'd prefer to just download an SQLite file directly from a server and just dump that in the app to query.
4. After downloads are complete, the download list frequently doesn't update. I can initiate the install from either the page for that specific app or from the download notification, but the main downloads list just shows that it's still downloading.
5. Not really a bug so much as missing feature: there's no way to do partial update checks. No way to check for updates to a single app without downloading the entire repo. I know there's an update available for X Y Z apps and want to update them on the bus, but because #3, 30 minutes is likely not long enough to do so. There's also no way to check a single repository for updates, and trying to bypass this by toggling that repo off and back on causes fdroid to update all repos in the order they were added. If I want to install an app from a new repo, I have to wait for all my other repos to finish updating first.
6. I have ~10 repos in fdroid. I regularly get a notification that the format is incorrect or the server couldn't be contacted or some such. It doesn't tell me what repo that is. My only option is to go through and toggle all my repos off, enable them one at a time, and
I've mostly given up. I can't get the latest update for apps from the website because fdroid doesn't make that available, I can't install updates automatically because I'm not rooted (and thus can't just trust that it'll eventually succeed in installing). I used to run my own fdroid repo for these apps; I don't anymore, because it's not worth the effort to try and get fdroid to install them.
It's not because I'm using some obscure hardware or ROM; I've had these issues with: Nexus 7 lineage, Nvidia shield lineage, Moto G6, Moto G6 lineage, Samsung A32 stock, Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 stock. Fdroid is usually the first thing I install after getting a new device or after rooting a device; I've had fdroid crash on the third time starting it on a brand new device, before I've done more than enable adb to install fdroid.
*This is _not_ a one-off case, this is an ongoing issue that I've had for years at this point*
Instead, for the few apps I actually care about keeping up to date, I use Obtainium, which checks GitHub releases (among others) instead of fdroid (it can check fdroid's website, but that's not kept up to date). As a bonus, this also allows me to keep track of apps that aren't included in fdroid (mostly Tachiyomi forks). Obtainium can't check for updates for individual apps without fetching and parsing the entire catalog, because fdroid only provides a full catalog (see #5)
I'm just going to note that Hacker News seems to attract people in the 99th percentile of unusual use cases. And that's fine in and of itself, but there seems to be a lack of perspective that leads to people in generalizing from their unrepresentative use cases. I would be willing to bet anything that the vast majority of users are not people who have 10 repos. Do you disagree?
As for your numbered points, I would say that a occasionally experienced 1, and never experienced two, three, or four.
I've used F-Droid on a Moto G, a Moto G3, Moto Z 2 3 and 4, a Moto E, a Nexus 7, a Pixel C tablet, across numerous versions of Android and Lineage OS. I've installed and uninstalled F-Driod dozens of times and installed and uninstalled hundreds of apps over several years across somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen devices. I've probably used at most 3-4 repositories.
So, what does all of that mean? Well, nothing other than that I can't confidently generalize from a one-off anecdote. Even if I'm really really personally convinced that my anecdote is the most important anecdote to end all anecdotes.
The problem is that internet comment sections are driven by psychological forces that don't necessarily translate into data from which it's safe to draw broad generalizations.
I've used Fdroid for years, downloaded and updated apps hundreds of times across multiple devices and never encountered a single thing you described.
Death, taxes, and people confidently generalizing from one-off cases of highly unusual experiences.
>I didn't realize the app was still being worked on.
By my count there have been three new updates to F-Droid just this year that were not alpha updates, and if you use F-droid these updates show up. If you use F-Droid, I don't know how you could possibly look at your app updates and not realize that is indeed being developed unless you're in the 99th percentile of highly unusual use cases. And if you're an unusual use case you shouldn't be generalizing from it.