[Commotion-dev] Fwd: Setting up your own app store with F-Droid

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

Let me know if you have any questions when you're setting it up! :)  It would
also be good to have Commotion MeshTether in the official F-Droid repo.  Its
easy enough to do.  I can help with that too.

.hc

On 11/06/2013 09:39 PM, Dan Staples wrote:
> it would be great to have our own F-Droid repo for the Commotion Android
> app!
> 
> Dan
> 
> 
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [liberationtech] Setting up your own app store with F-Droid
> Date: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 09:31:46 -0500
> From: Nathan of Guardian <nathan at guardianproject.info>
> Reply-To: liberationtech <liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu>
> To: liberationtech <liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu>
> 
> 
> Useful HOWTO and new tools package by Hans for anyone who needs to
> distribute their own Android software, outside of Google Play, using the
> excellent F-Droid.org project.
> 
> Clarification from below: While the US and Google no longer restrict
> access from Iran, the Google Play service is still unfortunately
> filtered and blocked there, and is increasingly facing app-specific
> filtering in other parts of the world (Viber downloads for Saudi Arabia,
> etc.) Ultimately, this is about a need to decentralize app distribution,
> while doing everything we can to ensure software security and
> verification for end-users.
> 
> More from Hans...
> 
> "The Google Play Store is not available in all parts of the world, the
> US restricts its use in certain countries like Iran, and many countries
> block access to the Play Store, like China. Also, the Google Play Store
> tracks it users actions, reporting back to Google what apps have been
> installed and also run on the phone. Because of the NSA leaks, we’re
> seeing that governments are actively tapping into the raw data streams
> of Google, Yahoo, and others. So that means that the information that
> the Google Play Store sends back to Google is also intercepted by the
> NSA and other country’s agencies like it, and they in turn also share
> that information with other governments. Lastly, the Google Play Store
> is not free software, unlike the core of Android itself. It is
> proprietary software that Google entirely controls.
> 
> F-Droid is a wonderful, free app store for Android. It is modeled after
> Debian or other GNU/Linux distros in that it has its own package
> repositories (repos) and build servers for all the apps that are part of
> the official OS. Like Debian and Ubuntu, you can also setup your own
> repos for anyone to use. Any free software can be added to the official
> F-Droid repos, where they are built and signed by the F-Droid server.
> This can be annoying because it means that your apps in F-Droid are
> signed by a different key than your apps in the Google Play Store. If
> you host your own F-Droid repo, then people can use F-Droid to install
> your own builds signed by your own signing key.
> 
> This is a quick HOWTO for how to setup such a repository on a Debian or
> Ubuntu box."
> 
> https://guardianproject.info/2013/11/05/setting-up-your-own-app-store-with-f-droid/
> 

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