According to the official website F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. Only apps that are open source and use only open source libraries are accepted in F-Droid. Let’s see what steps were taken to publish Open Event Android in F-Droid.

We need to build a different app for F-Droid because it cannot use any proprietary  libraries so instead of making a new app we made two flavors of the same app. One that would be published in playstore and the other for F-Droid. It is really easy to make different flavors of the same app. Just add the following lines in the build.gradle

flavorDimensions "default"

productFlavors {
fdroid {
dimension "default"
}

playStore {
dimension "default"
}
}

We specify the flavor dimension in the first line because all product flavors must have a flavor dimension and then we specify the name of our product flavors. That’s all that is required to make various flavors of an app after that we just need to remove the proprietary libraries from the F-Droid build.

When we have finished building the app we can start with the process of submitting the app to F-Droid. We need to send a Merge Request to the F-droid repository. Let’s see what all steps are required before we could submit our Merge Request to include our app in F-Droid

We need to clone the fdroid server directly from the source so that we have all the latest changes and set the path.

git clone https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver.git
export PATH="$PATH:$PWD/fdroidserver"

Then clone your fork of the fdroiddata repository and open the directory. You need to write your own username here.

git clone https://gitlab.com/nikit19/fdroiddata.git
cd fdroiddata

The following command will make a template for you in the metadata directory, the name of the file is our application id. If you open the metadata folder you will see text files of all the apps that are published in F-Droid. If you want to publish an app in F-droid it is this file that needs to be sent in merge request. There are no other changes that needs to be done, we just have to fill the fields in the meta file correctly.

cp templates/app-minimal metadata/com.eventyay.attendee.txt

After filling all the details in the meta file we need to commit those changes. The following command will check if there are any syntax errors in the meta file.

fdroid readmeta

Finally we need to build the app. The following command builds the app from the source repository so if we have followed all the steps correctly, the app would build successfully and then we can send the merge request.

fdroid build -v -l com.eventyay.attendee

Resources

1. Quick Start: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/README.md#quickstart
2. Making merge requests: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#merge-requests