F-Droid is a community-maintained software repository for Android based operating systems. It is similar to the Google Play store.
Replicant has depended very heavily on F-Droid for a long time now. End users expect app "stores" on their smart phones.
Unfortunately, F-Droid is not currently compliant with the FSF's Free Software Distribution Guidelines, which required Replicant to remove F-Droid from its upcoming 6.0 0004 release so that Replicant can continue to be FSDG compliant.
Much discussion has already been had within Replicant and between Replicant and F-Droid about how F-Droid can be modified in order to make it FSDG compliant so that it can be included again in Replicant in future releases.
F-Droid's build server has not purely free from proprietary blobs for a while now: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/-/issues/383
It is important for F-Droid to be built using free tools.
Android has a decentralized app building process. This can be a very positive thing, fostering a much more diverse and playful ecosystem than app stores that Google and Apple provide on their smartphones's OSes.
Due to the freedom issues in the F-Droid build system though, a threat exists to user privacy and security.
One of these freedom issues is the fact that far too many pre-builds exist.
Replicant wants an app distribution system that runs a free toolchain so that users can rely on a fully free ecosystem.
One way of achieving this might be to utilize beuc's rebuilds: https://android-rebuilds.beuc.net/
Replicant wants to write environment setup bash scripts to build FDroid with beuc's version of the SDK in order to be able to provide a reproducible build environment that others can test.
Another freedom issue with F-Droid is that F-Droid includes apps with anti-features that are not compatible with the GNU FSDG. These apps are available alongside apps that are compatible and they are only marked with these anti-features. See #1629 for development efforts and further information on this topic. https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/FDroid
Outcome: What metadata will be ok for them.
| Task | Budget | Comments |
|---|---|---|
| Build F-Droid from an FSDG compliant distribution | Hard to predict => Replicant funding | Replicant 6 can't be built with FSDG compliant distros but Replicant 4.2, 9.0 and probably 10.0 too can => We need F-Droid to be built from an FSDG compliant distributions |