Android: publish the app on F-Droid

[rtsisyk]

This OSS project should meet F-Droid guidelines.

[relan]

F-Droid maintainer here.

Kudos for starting this fork!

F-Droid main repo includes only free software. OMaps in its current shape is not free because of those Gradle plugins:

• com.google.gms.google-services
• com.google.firebase.crashlytics
• com.google.firebase.appdistribution

and those libraries:

• all com.google.android.gms:*
• all com.google.firebase:*
• com.flurry.android:analytics
• com.mopub:mopub-sdk-native-static
• com.appsflyer:af-android-sdk

I personally would love to see all this removed and can help with F-Droid inclusion then.

[nicolasmaia]

Is it possible to make a gradle flavor without these dependencies?

[relan]

Just checked the snapshot tagged as 2021-05-08. The good news is that I managed to build it without proprietary dependencies in the F-Droid environment! There are still a few issues left.

A major issue: missing private.h. OMaps just crashes because of missing server URLs. You should either fill all the constants to make OMaps work out-of-the-box or allow users to configure them on start. F-Droid does not sign up for keeping any "secrets" like API keys.

And a few minor notes:

• Versioning. The versionName and versionCode include a Git hash and the current date (see getVersion() in build.gradle). This won't work in F-Droid, versionName and versionCode must be constant across multiple gradle runs.
• Proprietary dependencies conditions. googleFirebaseServicesEnabled and googleMobileServicesEnabled make no sense for us as we still remove references to non-free Gradle plugins and libraries to avoid their downloading and accidental use. If those conditions were added only for F-Droid, you can safely drop them to simplify build.gradle.

[rtsisyk]

Hey @relan, thank you for your work making F-Droid package real. I took a look at F-Droid scripts, but I didn't have time to finish this work.

Proprietary dependencies conditions. googleFirebaseServicesEnabled and googleMobileServicesEnabled make no sense for us as we still remove references to non-free Gradle plugins and libraries to avoid their downloading and accidental use. If those conditions were added only for F-Droid, you can safely drop them to simplify build.gradle.

You are right, googleFirebaseServicesEnabled and googleMobileServicesEnabled flags were added especially for F-Droid. Please note that these flags not only remove Google/Firebases libraries, but also override some Java sources. For example, googleMobileServicesEnabled enables enhanced implementation of LocationProvider which relies both on GPS and Google data. F-Droid users will wait for location 5-10 minutes instead of 5-10 sec, but I hope that it is an informed choice.

Versioning. The versionName and versionCode include a Git hash and the current date (see getVersion() in build.gradle). This won't work in F-Droid, versionName and versionCode must be constant across multiple gradle runs.

Please feel free to send PRs to this repo instead of patching our build.gradle from the build scripts. You can add an optional parameter to disable automatic version generation and use this flag from F-Droid scripts.

[rtsisyk]

@relan, it would be nice if you could combine @linsui, my and your changes into a new MR to fdroiddata. We are busy with fixing the codebase itself.

[gerion0]

You are right, googleFirebaseServicesEnabled and googleMobileServicesEnabled flags were added especially for F-Droid. Please note that these flags not only remove Google/Firebases libraries, but also override some Java sources. For example, googleMobileServicesEnabled enables enhanced implementation of LocationProvider which relies both on GPS and Google data. F-Droid users will wait for location 5-10 minutes instead of 5-10 sec, but I hope that it is an informed choice.

Thank you for your work, just to clarify: With UnifiedNlp, MicroG provides a google free reimplementation to use GPS + cell/wifi data from e.g. Mozilla (well supported by F-Droid). Afaik, this can even be used on non rooted phones. Will Organicmaps use that within the F-Droid build, too? I have also installed the APK of Organicmaps from Github on a Google services free Android with UnifiedNLP and showing the current location works very well.