Make app available outside PlayStore?

[IzzySoft]

Is there a chance you would make the app available outside the walled garden of Google Play? For example, attach the APK to your tagged releases, or bring it to F-Droid (umpf, I just see implementation 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:18.1.0' which would be a show-stopper to the latter as it is proprietary and not FOSS – but maybe that can be worked-around by a suitable build flavor)? Not everybody can (or wants to) access Google Play.

Thanks in advance!

[EricTerrell]

Izzy, The app seems to work ok in the Android emulator, without support for google apis. If you're willing to test it on a non-Google device, I could make the apk available to you. And if that works out, I could add it to tagged releases and/or F-Drod. Sincerely, Eric Bergman-Terrell

[IzzySoft]

Challenge accepted! I bet it will work on my devices which, though they have no GApps installed, can access maps: I use microG, which is a FOSS pendant to the GSF. So here all calls to GMaps would be privacy-friendly mapped to use OSM, IIRC :smiley:

So let's go ahead: If you want me to try first, you could simply drop a link into this issue (once I've fetched the APK the link could be removed again if you prefer), and I'll then report back. Or you just start attaching it right away and I add it to my repo to make it easy to find, install and update for those using any of the available F-Droid clients.

[EricTerrell]

I've made the .apk available in a release. Please let me know if that works for you, Izzy.

[IzzySoft]

Thanks Eric! I've just pulled it and ran it through my scanner. As expected, it showed 2 NonFreeDeps, but no other "offenders":

Offending libs:
---------------
* Google Maps API (/com/google/android/gms/maps): NonFreeDep,NonFreeNet
* Google Mobile Services (/com/google/android/gms): NonFreeDep

2 offenders.

(GMaps drags in more GMS, which was to be expected). While this would be a show-stopper to F-Droid (as pointed out above), it's "acceptable" with my repo. I've tested the app on my FP2 (running LineageOS 18.1 with microG) – and again as expected, it seems to be working fine, so I'm now adding your app to my repo (will show up here with the next sync at around 6 pm UTC – be welcome to link there e.g. from the Readme then, and to pick a badge for that if you want).

I didn't check all features (as I'm indoors, accuracy was just based on network and such low, I didn't see how to save a point but that option might have been missing due to low location accuracy, etc). One thing I'd suggest is making the URL to be shared "configurable": Currently it goes to GMaps. An option to have it point to OSM (or even a custom URL where %lat and %long could be variables replaced on-share) would be nice for added privacy :wink:

[IzzySoft]

@EricTerrell looks like all releases (with the APKs attached) disappeared. Was that intended? Will they come back? Taking a closer look: the latest tag was 1.44, while the commit history suggests there were releases after that (up to 1.48). Would be nice to have them too – for the folks outside of Playstore's walled garden.

[EricTerrell]

I will endeavor to restore the releases.

Thanks,

ET

On Apr 26, 2023 at 3:21 PM, Izzy @.***> wrote:

@EricTerrell looks like all releases (with the APKs attached) disappeared. Was that intended? Will they come back? Taking a closer look: the latest tag was 1.44, while the commit history suggests there were releases after that (up to 1.48). Would be nice to have them too – for the folks outside of Playstore's walled garden.

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[IzzySoft]

Thanks a lot!

[IzzySoft]

Any progress on it? My updater still complains everyday.