FDroidCompliance¶

Introduction¶

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

Plan¶

Discuss with F-Droid to find a way to implement the FSDG compliance¶

Outcome: What metadata will be ok for them.

Implementation¶

Person: Fil Bergamo

Task	Budget	Comments	Deliverable
Implement the parsing of the properties	Hard to predict as it depends on the outcome of the discussion with F-Droid => Replicant funding
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	Building F-Droid from an FSDG compliant distribution + a quick HOWTO
Implement build time whitelists / blacklists	Nlnet? Rough number of hours		Can build F-Droid with custom blacklist and whitelists + quick HOWTO
Replicant F-Droid fork package in F-Droid	Nlnet? Rough number of hours		Package can be built with F-Droid tools, ideally upstream it