G-Droid

What is this app

G-Droid can browse the free F-Droid app-repository. It is an alternative client to the F-Droid client. You can follow the project website for some updates on Mastodon.

Screenshots

Additional features compared to F-Droid

shows reviews and comments for apps
star ratings of apps (up to 5 stars) - machine generated metrics
shows the star upstream star ratings (github, gitlab, sourceforge)
implements more metrics based on open source data (like average release cycle time) to generate a star-ratings
let the users choose which metrics are important to them, so there is no ‘best app’ in the repo - there is only a ‘best app’ from the point of view of the current user
shows ‘similar apps’ and ‘apps of the same category’ when watching an app
shows ‘apps of the same author’ when watching an app
shows a list of all authors, with their apps and average star rating
shows the web-site of the app even if it is ‘only a README file on github’. F-Droid has removed many websites (not all though) of apps the team doesn’t like. They also don’t allow (as of now) to re-add these link to the websites. This has been done with dodgy explanations and only for apps that the F-Droid team particularly dislikes (to censor apps they don’t like) and reduce the amount of download and users of these apps. Hint: if your app is affected and shows no website in F-Droid promote and encourage your users to use G-Droid.
shows newest apps and recently updated apps separated
does not censor the latest apps (F-Droid added censorship on 26/03/2019)
shows cards in same size for better overview
provides a list-view as alternative for the cards (as in older F-Droid versions) for people who don’t like cards
has more possibilities to order and sort apps
ability to ‘star’ apps to mark them locally
ability to hide apps to remove them from all views
shows categories in correct translation (if available) after changing language on the device
shows screenshots in correct translation
makes use of larger screens: shows actually more apps on tablets
tags to find apps for standard-tasks easily (email clients, file browsers, text editors), since the F-Droid categories are too broad
view for ‘random apps’ to discover apps you usually wouldn’t find
shows apps the user might like (without stealing the users data for analysis)
aims to provide many different views to the app repository in order to assist the user to find what she wants to find and encourage to use more open source apps from the repository
‘share’ apps so it can still be opened with another store (F-Droid, Yalp, Aurora, …), to get more information about the app.
different search algorithm, can ‘search harder’ to continue a search if the results are insufficient
shows the logos of apps all the time (if network connection is okay)
shows more screenshots
shows screenshots, completely, up-to-date and in the correct language
shows screenshots also when they are not in the fastlane structure
has a new and modern codebase and is easy to maintain
G-Droid is actively maintained (the F-Droid client is not any more)
many more to come (G-Droid is still pretty new and has only one developer [and many translators] right now) …

Things that G-Droid can NOT do (yet) compared to F-Droid

create a local repo, share apps with ‘near’ people or share apps via bluetooth
add other repositories than the F-Droid repo
use the privileged extension (done, but extension is not adjusted yet), G-Droid can use root permissions on rooted phones though, to provide unattended installs
update automatically
http proxy settings
G-Droid helps you in different ways to find better apps: but in some cases you might still need the ‘share’ button, to open that app in F-Droid to install it. G-Droid right now is not yet a complete replacement for the F-Droid app.

Things that are the same in G-Droid and F-Droid

shows the same apps - G-Droid does not add any apps or modify the builds, signatures or download URLs
all additional meta-data is provided by F-Droid as well (eg. the link to github)
GPL3 license

Explanation of permissions

INTERNET: to download the app-metadata and the apps
WRITE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE: To store the downloaded apps temporarily (permission only on older Android versions enforced)

Translating

The app is translated using Weblate. Follow these instructions if you would like to contribute.

While you can also send merge requests or patches modifying the translations, Weblate is a much better way to go. Use Weblate - it applies a series of fixes and suggestions, plus it keeps track of modifications and fuzzy translations. Applying translations manually skips all of the fixes and checks, and overrides the fuzzy state of strings.

Explanation of metrics

Stars on Github/Gitlab/Sourceforge:

The stars are being counted for all apps from the same source and then normalised twice. The day of the first release (on F-Droid) will be taken as creation date of the app. The number of stars will be divided by the number of days the app exists. So the new metric is ‘stars per day’. The stars per day are being compared to all other apps. The top 20% of all app will receive 100% for this metric. All apps below that will get a smaller percentage.

All apps in the top 20% of the list will receive 100% for this metric. All other apps will scale down from there on.

Up-To-Date Percentage:

Indicates the up-to-date-ness in percent. An Update just 1 day ago is 100% and the last update over a year ago is 0%. This is being calculated by the timestamp that F-Droid picks the update up, which can sometimes be a few days after the actual release.

Release Cycle:

The release cycle is only shown for apps with at least 3 releases. It will show the average time between these releases to supply an indication on how active the app is being developed.

The app had a release on 27/11/18, then on 17/12/18 (20 days later) and then on 29/01/19 (43 days). The average release cycle is 31.5 (=(20+43)/2) days so it will be shown as 32 days.

FAQ

Where do the ratings come from?

The implementation of the star ratings is not finalised yet.

For now all that users can do is read the code. It is all open source. You can read on https://gitlab.com/gdroid/gdroiddata/blob/master/env/process_meta_metric.py how to extract metrics out of the F-Droid repository.

Essentially if you look at the F-Droid data you can extract and extrapolate things like:

time between software updates
age of the software
amount of screenshots

Following the source-link that F-Droid provides one can also access the source repo and get metrics

amount of code changes
code life time
contributor activity
half-life of code blocks
ratio of abstract classes to normal classes
many other git, code and java metrics

Following the website that F-Droid provides one can also access the ratings that others provide on the upstream (github, gitlab, sourceforge, …). There you can also, find amount of open bugs, average time to fix a bug or even determine abandoned project.

And then all of it can be done for each app in the F-Droid repo and compared with each other.

Doing all these things manually is very cumbersome so G-Droid assists in that, to provide a better user experience.

And no. The data does not come from G-Droid users as there is (and will be) no tracking in the app. And it doesn’t come from other stores, as that would be irrelevant information and mostly spam that has been bought for money (eg. in Googles play store).

How can I add or remove an app from the tags?

If you are technically experienced you can look at this file: https://gitlab.com/gdroid/gdroiddata/blob/master/metadata/tags.yaml , change it and submit a merge request. If you don’t have the technical expertise or don’t have time to fiddle with it, you can open a new issue (https://gitlab.com/gdroid/gdroidclient/issues/new) or send an email. It will be sorted out for you. Either way, every contribution is welcome.

What does the ‘search harder’ and ‘search even harder’ do?

The normal search is searching only in the app names in your language (yes, apps can have different names in different languages).
‘search harder’ includes the app-summary into the search, which is a short description of the app in one or 2 sentences.
‘search even harder’ includes also the app description in the search result. This is similar to the search in the F-Droid client. The result will contain a maximum of results but many of them might be irrelevant.

Where do the similar apps come from?

They are calculated by this R script https://gitlab.com/frief/app_match.r made by Frieder Ferlemann. Please check it out and feel free to contribute to it, if you’d like to improve the similar apps.

Where do the comments for each app come from?

They are mastodon toots, mentioning the G-Droid account and using a special hashtag for each app. The hashtag is the package name of the app where dots are being replaced by underscores. In G-Droid you can simply use the button ‘write comment’ to create a comment-toot for an app.

Loading app icons takes a long time. Can they be cached?

The F-Droid server has sporadic performance issues. This causes the load of icons, but also the update of the repository and the download of the APKs to be very slow. The problem is being investigated. It might be resolved by using mirrors in future.

The app icons and all other images (like screenshots) are being cached. There have been reports, where all images are being reloaded all the time. If you have this error, please check if you have an ‘optimizer’ app running in the background that deletes the cache of some apps all the time. If so: disable this behaviour. Apart from that, the Android OS will use free space on your device to cache the app icons in G-Droid. This happens automatically with the Glide library.

Donate

Cash donations are not accepted. You can buy the author of this app a coffee if you have some spare cryptocurrencies.

BTC/BCH/BTG/etc: 1J2bbhJYksSjeynGGhuSPN9aTEaxiGm4nR
BTC Bech32: bc1qgshj3mtju02sg9ymse9cksfjdjh5gp0204w3zj
DASH: XbLRt5imEHc72KmhvC7V9v8f9NmYrmvweS
ETH: 0a6604dc5000c57e80f824601535db216e77482f
XMR: 4AffoFbFhfGZdBeMaQYSCMTURacM3qZYxKHQeLx8xkiLUjzk2GPzjCrNU5uquXEsEL6wcN8b5ULg5JdDaQfuQRkUJs6xx3f

Note: These addresses are taken from the original autors website (http://super-sm.art/). They are cryptographically signed, with the same key, that signed the git commits of this software project. Feel free to verify the GPG signatures so you can be sure, that you donation goes to the person, who actually commited the code of this software.

How much to donate? 🙂

Go to your nearest coffee shop (or bar [or cafe in the Netherlands]).
Get the price for a regular coffee (or beer). No surgar.
Optionally multiply by 2. Thanks.
Convert the price into a crypto currency mentioned above.
Donate the resulting value.

✌️