This issue might have popped up in the previous repo, but there are still people out there with custom ROMs and don't have Google services installed. Some can't access Google due to region-locking or just don't want to use the Playstore.

The thing that prevented it last time for it to be on the Open source store was that fdroid/rfp#97 the Cordova build required a Play-services fragment to be available during build. Maybe with the RN version it could be different.

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Maybe the builds can be automated with a CI. Or is it blocked, due to internal credentials for build?

The apps need to be signed so I dont think that would be possible.

On Wed, May 2, 2018, 5:26 PM Serkan-devel notifications@github.com wrote:

Maybe the builds can be automated with a CI. Or is it blocked, due to internal credentials for build?

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Why though?

You can place your keys into a .gitignore entry to hide it

Gitignore stops files from being commited so is unrelated.

The CI server would need the signing credentials. Right now the security risk here outweighs the benefits it woulf bring.

On Sat, May 5, 2018, 8:48 AM Serkan-devel notifications@github.com wrote:

You can place your keys into a .gitignore entry to hide it

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How do other open source projects commit to F-Droid? Isn't your CI private?

Can't the signing be the only thing hidden and release the source code for the CI as proof?

Hello, I'm a F-Droid contributor. We build every app from source on our build server and sign it with our own key. Does that answer your question?

@Rudloff they are trying to make their CIs public. But if the CI is completely public, one could see their private key when signing

@markharding I think this could help https://youtu.be/2uaTPmNvH0I

Any updates on this?

Could at least be a public apk available for download, officially from minds?

fdroid/rfp#97 (comment 80322175)

The app does not have any tagged release: https://github.com/Minds/mobile-native/releases This would make packaging easier.

Created by: trymeouteh

Could at least be a public apk available for download, officially from minds?

I would be OK with this too. This is what Gab does for their Andriod app. If you do offer a APK download please add a feature in the app that will notify the user when a new version of the app is available.

But an F-Driod release will be nice since it will also update the app when updates roll out.

Would it be possible to have a maintainer be responsible for managing Minds APK on f-droid? I don't have experience with f-droid but it seems like it could be an interesting project to work on.

@msantang78

assigned to @msantang78

changed milestone to %sprint: Wire

added 1 - High scoped label

added S - Backlog scoped label

mentioned in issue #677 (closed)

changed milestone to %sprint: X

changed milestone to %sprint: Zero

changed milestone to %sprint: Aspiring Albatross

changed milestone to %sprint: Boisterous Buffalo

changed milestone to %sprint: Clever Chipmunk

added S - InProgress scoped label and automatically removed S - Backlog label

added S - Backlog scoped label and automatically removed S - InProgress label

mentioned in issue front#1338 (closed)

@markeharding, Thank you for informing me about this ticket within ticket #1338.

However you (or any other staff member) have yet to provide the information that I requested within the previous ticket regarding the Google PlayStore agreement.

Could the requested information be either posted to this ticket or #1338? (also, please remember to tag me to your reply so that I can be notified in a timely and efficient fashion. Thanks.)

I believe we would be in violation of the following clause:

4.5 You may not use Google Play to distribute or make available any Product that has a purpose that facilitates the distribution of software applications and games for use on Android devices outside of Google Play.

(https://play.google.com/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html#non-compete)

Cc. @medworthy (I suggest modifying your gitlab notifications to include tickets you've interacted with(

@markeharding,
Thank you for the information. I can see that the 4.5 clause is the real issue here (which is really disappointing).

Something that I think that I mentioned to @jotto141 at the time that I was writing my "The many faces of the minds app" blog article (see URL below) was the suggestion of providing information within the minds.com/mobile page about Android's "install from unknown sources" security option. I think that some further instructions about installing the unfettered version of the Minds APK being included within the minds.com/mobile page would help a lot of users out.

I also took your advice and activated the "receive notifications about your own activity" tick-box within Gitlab's settings section and also set the "global notification level" to the "watch" status.

(Note that I have included information about the clause to the bottom of my article).

Reference:

The Many Faces Of The Minds App
https://www.minds.com/blog/view/979482529691869184

changed milestone to %sprint: Hipster Hedgehog

The F-Droid client would update the app.

Anyway, I see a custom maven repo and google services used in build.gradle and these are the real blockers for integration in F-Droid (the subject of this issue), not point 4.5 of some others store user agreement. :-(

changed milestone to %sprint: Interesting Iguana

changed weight to 2

changed title from Release it on F-Droid to Release on F-Droid

changed the description

added Platform::Mobile scoped label

added Platform::Mobile::Android scoped label

changed milestone to %sprint: Jolly Jellyfish

added Squad::Green scoped label

changed milestone to %sprint: Kilted Koala

@msantang78 can you write up your findings about google services.

@brianhatchet as Licaon_Kter wrote above the terms of F-droid forbid to have the google play services inside the app https://f-droid.org/es/docs/Inclusion_Policy/ We can't build the app without it because it is required by the Jitsi SDK.

Checking the code of the new release of the Jitsi SDK it now seems to have an option to build it without the google sign-in feature (removing the need of the play services)

But update the SDK into the app will not be a trivial task. I have forked the Jitsi SDK and the package react-native-jitsi-sdk because we needed custom features and I also updated the react-native version of the Jitsi SDK to prevent some conflicts and fixed the sdk for 64bits builds.

Regarding Jitsi see the Riot/RiotX effort on fdroiddata repo.

@ottman,@jotto141, @Serkan-devel, @benhayward.ben, @licaon-kter, @msantang78, @mikeyyeahyeah & @Rudloff,
There are several issues that concerns me, the first is concerning a recent report that was published on the reclaimthenet.org site (see URL below) and the second is related to F-Droid's terms of service agreement (section 2: Responsibility of Contributors), which states: "the Content is not pornographic". Considering the nature of the Minds Platform, ie. the free speech element (as long as the content doesn't violate US federal and Connecticut state legislation), F-Droid may (and I stress the term "may") no longer be considered as being a viable option.

Reference:

F-Droid bans Gab for being a “free speech zone” (Reclaimthenet Article)
https://reclaimthenet.org/f-droid-bans-gab-app
F-Droid Terms of Service
https://forum.f-droid.org/tos

Considering the above issues, I recommend that a member of Minds senior staff team (ie. @ottman or @jotto141) tries to open a dialogue with someone from within F-Droid's management team, with the sole intention of clarifying F-Droid's stance in relation to allowing the "unfettered" (full) version of the Minds APK.

We didn't ban Gab, install Fedilab from F-Droid and you have full access to Gab. Or someone can make a repo for the Gab-specific app. F-Droid places no restrictions on repos. The f-droid.org community decided we do not want to promote Gab or included in the main repo.

To clarify, that is in fact a ban on Gab, the app, and talking about it in any fora of F-Droid (like what is going on here). The related discussion about it is now locked to the public. is nice that @eighthave instructs people on using Gab in lieu of just not banning it, however…

@benhayward.ben To my knowledge it was actually not a community decision, but a secret decision on part of the core F-Droid team. The distinction is important.

Thank you kindly for taking the time to clarify that @eighthave

@eighthave,
Thank you for providing this information. As you must be aware, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding Gab and I thought that it would be a good idea to have someone from F-Droid's team clarify F-Droid's stance (especially when considering Minds free speech and open dialogue policies).

a blog post is in the works

@eighthave,
I am wondering if the blog post will be sanctioned (or produced) by either F-Droid's management or PR team?

Both and neither ;-) we're a community-driven, free software project, so we don't really have management or PR in the company sense. So it'll happen via a consensus-based review process.

@eighthave,
In that case, can you please enlighten us about F-Droid's organisational structure?

Can you also please provide further information about the following article and in particular the following statement:

"F-Droid as a project soon celebrates its 9th birthday. In these 9 years, F-Droid’s mission was and is to create a place where people could download software they can trust – meaning only free, libre and open source software is available on its flagship repository. As a project, it tried to stay neutral all the time. But sometimes, staying neutral isn’t an option but instead will lead to the uprise of previously mentioned oppression and harassment against marginalized groups. We don’t want and won’t support that. F-Droid is taking a political stance here.

F-Droid won’t tolerate oppression or harassment against marginalized groups. Because of this, it won’t package nor distribute apps that promote any of these things. This includes that it won’t distribute an app that promotes the usage of previously mentioned website, by either its branding, its pre-filled instance domain or any other direct promotion. This also means F-Droid won’t allow oppression or harassment to happen at its communication channels, including its forum. In the past week, we failed to fulfill this goal on the forum, and we want to apologize for that."

Please could you also provide official F-Droid definitions for terms such as "oppression" and "harassment" (I am sorry to bring this up but we are all aware of the current political situation and the misuse of definitions that are effecting many countries and are being propagated by individuals that have specific political interests that they wish to enforce on wider communities).

Reference:

Public Statement on Neutrality of Free Software
https://f-droid.org/en/2019/07/16/statement.html

@eighthave,
Again, I apologise for bringing up this hot-button topic but considering that we do want to further promote Minds services and also considering the sensitive nature of this topic, I presume that you can appreciate my (and other users) concerns about this issue.

@eighthave,
I have done some further research and it seems like F-Droid Limited (aka. F-Droid) is a not-for-profit British company (but is not a registered charity) and is headed by Ciaran Gultnieks, I have also noticed that you are listed within F-Droid's about page.

Considering that F-Droid Ltd. is based within the UK, as well as considering the current political and main-stream media stances surrounding the UK "hate-speech" narratives (note that I am also a British citizen and am very much aware of the current political situation), I am afraid that (in my own personal opinion) these issues do raise further alarm bells.

Reference:

F-Droid About Page
https://f-droid.org/en/about

F-Droid is based in the UK as much as Debian is based in the US. The founder is in the UK and one corporate entity is in the UK. There are also parts of F-Droid in Iceland, India, Russia, Germany, USA, Austria, Poland, Brazil, Romania, etc.

That app was banned mostly because its supporters sent us a wave of direct insults and death threats via multiple private channels. Why on earth would we volunteer to help people who are threatening to kill us?

I got zero of those. The one Gab user I found on the forums is to the contrary very nice. However there are reportedly a million accounts/users on Gab, and what you are engaging in is, I assume, guilt by association?

Even in the USA, free speech does not cover threats and assaults.

Which is why you should report that. In possibly misrepresenting Gab officially, both the UK and the US have libel laws. Where does "assault" come into the picture?

mentioned in merge request fdroid/fdroid-website!356

@eighthave,
I appreciate the issue of having death threats and threats of assault being viewed by contributors (no matter how probable or otherwise improbable these threats would be to actually have carried out) but we all are aware that these threats are provided by a minority of a given service / platforms user base.

It very unfortunate that F-Droid's contributors do get to see these sort of threats but I noted that this issue was never addressed within the official F-Droid statement (dated July 16th) and whilst it can be very hard for F-Droid's contributors / staff members to further investigate the alleged perpetrators of said threats, I presume that these threats were reported to the official legal channels so that if necessary, these threats can be further investigated and dealt with?

Whilst again it is unfortunate, this is one reason why I do think that once a organisation reaches a certain size / status, they need to consider incorporating a public relation department within their organisational structure (so that individual contributors / staff members can then refer any communication via said PR department and if necessary, have the PR department deal with any unruly users and inappropriate comments).

I do think that banning any organisation from providing their open source based APK ("app") from F-Droid's repository based on the actions of a minority of said organisations user base could not only be considered as being unfair to said organisation but could also be considered as being disingenuous to the majority of Gab's user base.

gab.com/gab.ai is a mastodon service. Mastodon clients like Fedilab will work just fine with those servers. Those have always been and continue to be available in f-droid.org. Some people didn't like that the Tusky clients blocks the gab servers in the code. Someone made a fork of Tusky within the past couple of weeks and labeled it Gab. This is what we do not want to include in f-droid.org. From what I've seen, that "Gab" app was a PR stunt to get attention.

They are free to make their own fdroid repo with whatever APKs they want in it. Any F-Droid user can subscribe to any repo, and we will not block or ban repos in the client. So this is another totally unrestricted channel that anyone can use. F-Droid is decentralized, and we work hard to improve that, since we do not want to be in the middle of everything. We want free software to be free.

The f-droid.org collection is like any other internet service in that it has something like "Terms of Service". F-Droid is very different in that it is both decentralized, and 100% free software. So anyone can start their own with any terms they want, all the tools and code are there.

This is a centralized decision that incentivise Gab to make non-free software wrt. the rules not being the same for them in the biggest free-software Android distribution service there is.

If you truly consider the secondary citizen treatment to be equal, how does it warrant "staying neutral isn’t an option but instead will lead to the uprise of previously mentioned oppression and harassment against marginalized groups", and if it is as effective as only being a ban in name only, why?

And if the resulting, predicted, and described effect is tarnishing F-Droids reputation, why use it to give Gab a PR campaign? If the line can be drawn and explained clearly, what other apps will be banned?

There's a difference, "the Gab app for Gab services" (<- this got pre-banned even if not such app was yet requested to be hosted by F-Droid) versus "any generic Mastodon app that can connect to a Gab instance" (not banned in any way)

So if Gab had their own codebase their app would not be banned? How does that factor into "F-Droid is taking a political stance here."

And why would "Freetusky" (Tusky sans instance blocking) be allowed?

@eighthave,
I have noticed that you have not directly addressed my previous comment (in relation to the issue of threatening behaviour by a minority of users and Gab.com / Gab.ai "supporters").

However on another point, according to F-Droid's Terms of Service (ToS) policy, there is a clause that includes the phrase "the Content is not pornographic". Depending on local territorial legislation, the term "pornographic" could be interpreted in many different ways. As an example, late last year I questioned Minds Inc. staff about their interpretation of the term "explicated" (which in this context and for the sake of argument, the term "explicated" could be considered as substitute for the term "pornographic"), in which I used the example of Michelangelo's statue of David and Alexandros statue of Antioch Venus de Milo (see URL below) which both could be determined as being of a pornographic nature in some territories (note that F-Droid's terms does include the phrase "any access to or use of the Website will be governed by the laws of the state of California, U.S.A.". Please also note that according to F-Droid's ToS agreement, the term "Website" and any derivation of this term includes F-Droid.org hosting service, therefore presumingly this ToS does also cover the usage of F-Droid's provided / supported repositories).

Anyway the above is a little bit of a tangent, my main point within this comment is that considering that users are entitled to post content that could be deemed as being of a pornographic nature (and therefore falls under Minds Not Safe / Suitable For Work criteria and are marked with an explicated / NSFW / mature tag), would the Minds "unfettered" APK (which provides access to said NSFW content) be considered as being unsuitable for inclusion within F-Droid's provided services?

Reference

Minds Help And Support Enquiry About What Could Be Considered As Being Explicated (Pornographic) https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/903389607309582336

I don't know. I play a minor role in app reviews. If it is not explicitly a porn app, my guess is yes.

The bigger point is that we want to push towards decentralization so these questions are all much easier to handle.

I'm not sure which question or comment you think I haven't addressed.

Pushing towards decentralization at any cost does a few things currently. It means users have more repos that may be unverified, onto which actors that don't command the same level of trust can push apps, with very few measures in place to gauge build-quality.

To quote the TWIF describing what Gab supposedly champions (though not really), this section holds true:

While in theory this might seem to be a good concept, it has serious consequences: things like racism, sexism, verbal abuse, violent nationalist propaganda, discrimination against gender and sexual minorities, antisemitism and a lot more things become popular on such instances.

@eighthave,
Thank you for the information surrounding the pornography issue. As far as the other issue is concerned, I suppose that my question would be on the following lines:

Does F-Droid's staff members / contributors considers it to be a justifiable action to remove a APK (which act as a gateway to a 3rd party platform / service) from F-Droid's repositories if a minority of the 3rd party users conducted in providing threats to F-Driod's staff members / contributors (especially considering that the 3rd party platform staff members don't approve of, encourage or condone said threats, also considering that any threats that are being conducted on the 3rd party platform / service would be considered as being a violation of said 3rd party ToS agreement and that such threats would be subject to further action by said 3rd party, which could possible involve the termination of the offenders account on said 3rd party platform / services)?

I am no longer an official contributor, but I professionally do translate and consider legalese in various respects, so you will get my IANAL opinion. According to my incomplete reading of the current F-Droid TOS, (which for my sake is unenforceable in/under EU-GDPR law, in the least because it is not accepted specifically):

[If you post material to the Website, post links on the Website, or otherwise make (or allow any third party to make) material available by means of the Website (any such material, “Content”), You are entirely responsible for the content of, and any harm resulting from, that Content. That is the case regardless of whether the Content in question constitutes text, graphics, an audio file, or computer software. By making Content available, you represent and warrant that:

…

the Content is not pornographic](https://forum.f-droid.org/tos)

(Bold text added by me)

This part is ill-devised:

You are entirely responsible for the content of, and any harm resulting from, that Content.

In more banal terms, you would also have to validate:

you have, in the case of Content that includes computer code, accurately categorized and/or described the type, nature, uses and effects of the materials

without falling afoul of the above…

Plausibly a court could find that it is reasonable for a user to expect someone to be "responsible" for some, or less likely all of that, even though for example the GNU GPLv3+ to the extent that is lawful does not hold the copyright holder or distributor responsible.

Putting in disclaimers like this don't necessarily invalidate prior claims.

F-Droid disclaims any responsibility for any harm resulting from the use by visitors of the Website …

Edit: The UK will soon put mandated age restriction in place, with hefty fines backing it up, so anything porn specifically would have to comply for fear of economic ruin on part of F-Droid.

@eighthave thanks for taking the time to respond here.

To keep this chat on topic, we've currently put this task on hold as the build process looks a little more involved that we anticipated. We were intending on simply uploading a signed APK (as we do with Google Play and our own app), but it appears as though f-droid creates the build via build scripts.

marked the task Public APK of app as completed

@kingu use the EDIT button ffs

removed milestone

@eighthave,
My last question may have been a bit unfair for me to ask (but I will leave it there, if you wish to answer it then please feel free to, if you don't then I do understand).

Last night I was reviewing F-Droid's merge-request #356 (plus associated links) and found the discussion to be very interesting. I also realised that there has been a lot of thought being provided by various member of F-Droid's community (I also want to thank @licaon-kter for providing the reference to this merge-request entry).

So I think that only question that remains to be asked is: within your own opinion, if Minds decides to upload their unfettered APK to a F-Droid repository (either the main or an alternative repository), can you foresee any reason why the Minds unfettered APK would be subsequently removed / banned from F-Droid's services?

Reference:

F-Droid Merge Request 356
fdroid/fdroid-website!356

Release on F-Droid

Related issues 0

Related issues
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