Core Apps » Bazaar

This past month was dominated by organizing the upcoming large development sprint starting in February. This means hiring a number of people to do all the work. We had 20+ applications, lots of email, and 5 interviews. We hired two experienced developers, and 4 part time junior developers.

There were also a few notable achievements in the development work:

• Completed an automated system for mass-verifying reproducible builds
• Finalized possible technical approaches for curation tools
• F-Droid website converted into a app store website toolkit
• Designed multi-language survey about developer challenges
• Designed user test of the developer tools and documentation

The first results from the user research into developers have been published:
https://guardianproject.info/2017/01/26/imagining-the-challenges-of-developers-in-repressive-environments/

Objective 1 Simple multi-pronged distribution¶

We now have https://verification.f-droid.org/ automatically building the latest apps and testing whether they are reproducible. We are up to 59 apps that can be built reproducibly using the F-Droid tools. To see which apps, search for “verified” on https://verification.f-droid.org/. Now that we have a mass rebuild process running automatically, the next step is to focus on some more important apps in order to fix the issues preventing them from being rebuilt reproducibly.

Objective 2 Curation Tools for Organizations¶

We hired Torsten Grote, who has worked with Briar Project among many other things, to lead up the development of the Curation Tools. We hammered out all of the technical possibilities and interviewed a number of people with key experience with the target use cases to figure out which is going to be the most useful approach. Since this project is addressing new uses cases for the F-Droid tools, the aim is to figure out which of the more popular use cases that we can address the easiest. This provides us the quickest path to figuring out whether this is a fruitful direction to pursue more after this initial project is complete. With that in mind, we nailed down these key points to guide us:

• web v. mobile app
• multi-user support v. ease of maintenance
• Mobile is better aligned with our technical infrastructure but might not be nearly as useful to the target audience as a multi-user web app that’s easy to deploy

If any of you have ideas about this topic, and what to offer your feedback to help figure out the best direction, please do get in contact with us!

Ultimately, whether the curation tool is a web or mobile app, both will be deploying to web infrastructure like Amazon S3, GitHub, or even a standard web server. So for that, the work going into the f-droid.org website overhaul will provide building blocks for what the curation tools publish. For example, there is now an F-Droid plugin for Jekyll, which makes it easy to include all the data from an F-Droid app/media repository into a custom website. All of these bits got us thinking: in a sense, we are building a toolkit for anyone to build their own Paskoocheh, ASL19’s custom curated “app store” that has taken off recently in Iran.

Objective 3 Modern App Store with Built-in Circumvention¶

UX Overhaul¶

There new f-droid.org website is now usable in its prototype form, including listing all apps and a big overhaul of all the documentation. The old manual and wiki were merged into a new “Docs” section, and many pages there were edited and updated. We now have a single overview of the documentation needed for all the various parts of F-Droid.

We will be using this prototype version of the website https://eighthave.gitlab.io/fdroid-website/ for the upcoming developer survey and developer tools user test. The feedback from both of those will then guide us in finishing the overhaul of the website.

The new website is now based on a custom Jekyll plugin for working with F-Droid app/media indexes: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/jekyll-fdroid/ This plugin allows any Jekyll website to easily use F-Droid app index data, including available apps and media files, all available versions, all descriptive text and graphics, etc.

User Testing¶

We have been working through all of the feedback from the user tests, and updating the UX designs based on that.

Peter Serwylo was on a well deserved vacation all of January, after finished his Ph.D. Once he returns, he will be increasing his work time on this project to 3 days a week until the end of Spring. Since he’s the main client dev, implementation progress there was slow in January.

Objective 4 Partner Deployments¶

In China, where there is no single de facto Android app store, it is quite common to directly download apps to install them. The problem there is then there is no automatic update channel. A number of apps that care more about security include automatic updating directly in the app. But this is in conflict with the Google Play Terms of Service. From the feedback that we received from Tibetan partner, we are putting together two libraries to help with this problem. First, the F-Droid tools provide the essential architecture, then we just need to rebundle this to work as a standalone updater. This design is also based on feedback from people at Google to make sure that the library’s updating process complies with Google Play’s Terms of Service so that projects can embed it in their apps without worrying about whether their apps will be kicked out of Google Play for including self-update capabilities. A parallel library directs users towards installing the F-Droid client app to provide the update channel rather than self-updating. Using the F-Droid client app provides central update management as well as a more fine tuned update procedure that includes all of the working circumvention techniques (nearby swap, “collateral freedom” mirrors, Tor support, etc.).

Follow the implementation progress here:

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/issues/852
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/issues/714

Objective 5 Usability Research on In-country Developers¶

We began coding and analysis of interviews for the final report, continued work on the design of user tests of the F-Droid developer tools, and completed the design of the developer survey.

Research Report / (Interview Coding)¶

We began transcribing and coding the developer interviews conducted during this activity. Transcription is nearly complete, and coding has been completed for one third of the interviews. The interviews are being coded to identify similarities and differences between international developer:

• Goals: Why they develop software;
• Needs: What they need to meet those goals;
• Challenges: The things that get in their way of meeting those needs;
• Strategies: The tools and techniques they engage in to overcome those challenges; and
• Networks: The people they interact with who support, or thwart, the above.

Analysis of the interviews will be completed in the early half of February. Writing will begin upon the completion of analysis. Once survey data has been collected (middle of march) that data will be Incorporated into the final research output.

User Testing¶

We completed scoping the activities for UX testing during the last month. UX testing will focus on the F-Droid developer documentation, setup of an F-Droid binary application repository, and updating an application within an existing F-Droid repository. Fortuitously, there have been recent contributions to the F-Droid website that have provided an opportunity for a restructuring of the documentation. UX testing will be able to test this new documentation before it goes live. The UX testing documentation and technical setup will be completed in the early half of February and testing will be completed by the end of the month.

Surveys¶

While survey design was completed in December, unforeseen complications led to delays in translation. Translation is expected to begin in the first week of February. We have also begun collecting quotes from professional translation services in case the current provider is unable to begin the translation process.