Publishing apps

Fdroid is a famous software repository hosted with numerous free and open source Android apps. They have a main repository where they allow developers hosting free and ad free software after a thorough check up on the app. This blog will tell you how to get your project hosted in their repository using steps I followed to publish the PSLab Android app. Before you get started, make sure you have the consent from your developer community to publish their app on Fdroid. Fdroid requires your app to use all kind of open resources to implement features. If there is any closed source libraries in your app and you still want to publish it on Fdroid, you may have to reimplement that feature by any other mean without using closed source resources. They will also not allow to have Google’s proprietary “play-services” in your app along with proprietary ad services. You can find the complete inclusion policy document from their official page. When your app is fully ready, you can get started with the inclusion procedure. Unlike how we are publishing apps on Google Play, publishing an app on Fdroid is as simple as sending a pull request to their main repository. That’s exactly what we have to do. In simple terms all we have to do is: Fork the Fdroid main data repository Make changes to their files to include our app Do a pull request First of all you need a GitLab account as the Fdroid repository is hosted in GitLab. Once you are ready with a GitLab account, fork and clone the f-droid-data repository. The next step is to install the fdroid-server. This can be simply done using apt: $ sudo apt install fdroidserver Once that is done, go into the directory where you cloned the repository and run the following command to read current meta data where it saves all the information related to existing apps on Fdroid; $ fdroid readmeta This will list out various details about the current meta files. Next step is to add our app details into this meta file. This can be done easily using following command or you can manually create folders and files. But the following is safer; $ fdroid import --url https://github.com/fossasia/pslab-android --subdir app Replace the link to repository from the --url tag in the above command. For instance the following will be the link for fossasia-phimpme android; $ fdroid import --url https://github.com/fossasia/phimpme-android --subdir app This will create a file named as “org.fossasia.pslab” in the metadata directory. Open up this text file and we have to fill in our details. Categories License Web Site Summary Description Description needs to be terminated with a newline and a dot to avoid build failures. Once the file is filled up, run the following command to make sure that the metadata file is complete. $ fdroid readmeta Then run the following command to clean up the file $ fdroid rewritemeta org.fossasia.pslab We can automatically add version details using the following command: $ fdroid…