From david at boddie.org.uk  Sat Oct 27 14:00:58 2018
From: david at boddie.org.uk (David Boddie)
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2018 20:00:58 +0200
Subject: [Mobile-sig] Publishing apps on F-Droid
Message-ID: <2611617.MW3g1z1oMF@aurora>

I was recently talking to some people on the FSFE's Android discussion list
about some small applications I had written to back up data to a phone's
storage, and someone suggested I upload them to F-Droid.

https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/android
https://www.f-droid.org

I hadn't tried to publish anything I'd written via a "store" before so it
was interesting to see how the process would go. I chose a more useful
application as a test case, though there are plenty of weather applications
already available. The result is available here:

https://www.f-droid.org/en/packages/uk.org.boddie.android.weatherforecast/

Publishing on F-Droid was fairly easy, despite the non-standard tools I am
using. The people on the F-Droid forums were friendly and helpful, and gave
me the hints I needed to get my application to build in their infrastructure.

I think it helps if you are active in trying to publish your own application
on F-Droid rather than relying on someone else to submit it for packaging
because you can write your own metadata and submit a merge request directly
instead of filing an issue in the Requests For Packaging tracker.

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/issues

This obviously requires more work on your part: cloning a couple of
repositories, adding metadata, running the fdroid tool to make sure the
metadata is good and that the application builds, then committing the
change and submitting a merge request. It sounds like more work than it
really is.

Note that the F-Droid system builds applications from source and signs them
itself, so you won't be publishing closed source applications. One benefit
is that their build system does all the work; another is that your
application gets some testing in a "clean" build environment.

David