F-Droid's maintainer is against shipping builds of their app without rebranding the app id, app name and logo which is itself reasonable. However, F-Droid itself distributes builds of thousands of apps without following those same expectations for them...
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According to F-Droid, distributing a non-rebranded alternate build of their app undermines their brand. That's their overall approach to packaging.
matrix.f-droid.org/room/!UAdCANfo
I personally don't care if they reuse name/logo for alternate builds, but reusing app ids is very broken.
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If a user installs the F-Droid build of an app in one profile, they get a key pinning error when they try to install the official build in another profile. Reusing app ids goes against the entire purpose behind having app ids. Each incompatible build needs to their own app id...
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Incorrect app id reuse leads to users reporting the same key pinning errors upstream over and over.
F-Droid also places a substantial burden on upstream developers by distributing their own builds of apps with undocumented downstream changes and significantly delayed updates...
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The app id reuse also causes significant usability issues beyond the key pinning errors users encounter across profiles. Users run into similar issues with updates. F-Droid will think it can provide updates to an app installed from elsewhere and vice versa for Play Store, etc.
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Some developers create these issues on their own by not using separate app ids for different variants of their apps, but many are handling this properly and most don't have incompatible variants available. F-Droid is the elephant in the room making this a common real world issue.
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blocks basically all core contributors so we can't respond to him here. It is definitely hurtful to us that he posts what feel like attacks, and then tries to block us from even offering our side of the story.
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This is definitely a big issue. I did the mistake of using the same app ID for GitHub and F-Droid builds for , and the users cannot switch between two without uninstalling the other. But I guess most F-Droid users are already aware of this.
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The main issue is that users get confused when they get an error trying to install a different variant of an app in a different profile. It comes up a lot on GrapheneOS since people use profiles as isolated workspaces and can install Google Play as regular apps in a profile.
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