Add F-Droid for installing apps

[Porrumentzio]

1. Go to Settings>Apps>Install apps
2. It will propose Browser and Google Play to install apps

It would be great if F-Droid would also be an option.

---

Also in Settings>Meta, there appears the Google Play logo, instead of a general App Installing Repo. If F-Droid installed, it offers both Google Play and F-Droid.

So changing that icon would be greatful, although I don't have a concrete proposal.

[finnmglas]

That's two valid points there:

1. Settings>Apps>Install apps: True, I did not notice that until you mentioned... I just found the reason:

See line 60 of SettingsFragmentActions.kt:

Uri.parse("https://play.google.com/store/apps/")) - the PlayStore url is opened using an Intent rather than a more general Uri like market:// which would include other stores.

2. Settings>Meta: If anyone can come up with a font-awesome icon to replace the PlayStore icon, just comment below or create a pull request with the new icon inside.

I can't think of any trivial icon to replace the current one with though...

[Porrumentzio]

Great!
About the icon, maybe a "download icon" would be enough, a downwards arrow.

What do you think? Could you add the "help needed" label?

[finnmglas]

I found a store icon that seems appropriate - we should use that... I liked the download icon idea but as the user already downloaded the app when he is in the in-app settings (obviously), the store icon is a reasonable choice 👍

[finnmglas]

The meta settings ended up looking like this:

[finnmglas]

I created a thread on StackOverflow about this topic. The official F-Droid application does not seem to listen to Intent.CATEGORY_APP_MARKET (not declared in its manifest), which makes fixing this issue even harder.

I received the suggestion that I could fix this by contributing to the F-Droid application... that kinda lays beyond the scope of Launcher though (but I actually consider doing it...)

[Porrumentzio]

Hi! It's a good icon, although I wouldn't understand it clearly because for me sofware is not for shopping, but yes for many people.

About the F-Droid intent, did you think about posting that problem into https://forum.f-droid.org?

[rptb1]

When DAVx5 needs to subscribe you to a WebCAL it asks you to install ICSx5, and it manages to do this via F-Droid. I'm not sure if this is helpful, but the line of code is here https://gitlab.com/bitfireAT/davx5-ose/-/blob/dev-3.x-ose/app/src/main/java/at/bitfire/davdroid/ui/account/WebcalFragment.kt#L133 . This looks like a market intent that you're saying doens't work, but I'm pretty sure it popped up F-Droid on my phone. However, I do have the F-Droid privileged extension installed, which may have something to do with it.

[rptb1]

Another possibly relevant thing. If I enter market://details?id=at.bitfire.icsdroid into the Firefox address bar and choose "open in app" I'm offered all possible app stores, so there's clearly a sort of "throw this out there" operation for such a URL. This is F-Droid 1.10 on /e/OS (Android 10).

[finnmglas]

@rptb1 Yeah, that also works with Launcher - the onClick of the fa-store icon uses a market:// intent that is received by F-droid, the PlayStore and the Samsung Galaxy Store - the only problem here was that I didn't manage to get a market uri to the market homepage - only to search or details pages ...

[toby-bro]

Isn't it possible to open the app directly by knowing that it is installed as "org.fdroid.fdroid" ?
Otherwise couldn't it be possible to pass it as a spinner in the settings::launcher menu : default app repo ? By doing so the user can choose what the button is to do by default. Furthermore that would make it easy to implement it on the app.

[Kj-is-escape]

I think this issue is solved already, maybe by an update on f-droid. But in my phone i'm asked to select an app.