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twitter.com/element_hq/sta Disappointing, but not surprising. I'm curious if this is a mistake or the next step in removing apps providing access to messaging platforms without the moderation that's expected. Google has scanning capable of making an account and checking it out.

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Element

@element_hq

Jan 29, 2021

Google have suspended Element in the Play Store without notifying us; we're reaching out to find out what's going on. Apologies for the inconvenience; in the interim there's f-droid.org/en/packages/im but it's a few versions behind. We'll post updates here.

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Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Jan 30, 2021

F-Droid's main repository having out-of-date app versions is completely normal. It's part of why we're not going to be bundling it in GrapheneOS. We do expect that most GrapheneOS users end up F-Droid and likely also Aurora Store, but we have to build something better to include.

Radical Decentralization

@X54h0IT3

Jan 30, 2021

Replying to

@DanielMicay

Pardon my ignorance. F-Droid has a concept of additional repositories (Bromite uses one for example). Aren't these completely under app's owner control and can be released as often as you like?

Daniel Micay

@DanielMicay

Replying to

@X54h0IT3

Yes, but that's distinct from the main F-Droid repository that's enabled by default which is a repository from the F-Droid project with their builds of the apps, signed with their keys. In *theory*, they can redistribute a reproducible build of an app with a developer signature.

2:02 AM · Jan 30, 2021Twitter Web App

Replying to

and

In practice, it's their own builds of all the apps with their own keys. Same app ids though, which ends up confusing users when they try to install incompatible app builds from alternate sources. The OS itself enforces pinning and downgrade protection so you can't do that.

Replying to

and

It's very common for the apps to lag behind the upstream releases for one reason or another and there are a huge number of apps without anything close to the resources needed to actually maintain them. Also quite problematic having many with no (or poor) maintenance upstream.