cernekee / ics-openconnect

Android UI for OpenConnect VPN client
GNU General Public License v2.0
368 stars 131 forks source link

why is the project not developing? #69

Open FetFrumos opened 2 years ago

FetFrumos commented 2 years ago

I want using openconnect in my android app. but I see that the project has not been developed for several years. many reports of build problems in new versions of android. What is the reason for stopping development? is it worth investing now at this time? perhaps there is another alternative?

dlenski commented 2 years ago

I believe I'm the last person to make significant contributions here (see https://github.com/dlenski/ics-openconnect).

I'm also an active ongoing contributor to the upstream OpenConnect/libopenconnect (https://gitlab.com/openconnect/openconnect).

What is the reason for stopping development?

I can only speak for myself…

  1. I no longer have any need to use the Android client, or provide it to my colleagues at $EMPLOYER. That takes away a lot of my motivation.
  2. I spend a lot of my free time on the upstream OpenConnect project. I consider that work much more interesting and useful all around.
  3. Bug reports and other feedback from users of Android apps are of a strikingly poor quality compared to users of the POSIX CLI openconnect application.
  4. Building/testing/deploying this app on Android is more difficult and time-consuming, particularly when it comes to managing and understanding the interactions between the native lib and the Android UI.

is it worth investing now at this time? perhaps there is another alternative?

Yep, it's certainly worth picking up again.

Especially if you can fix the CI (https://github.com/dlenski/ics-openconnect/commit/a52f203980f8934ef9422a27ecb948d9381781c0), and make it build APK artifacts on every commit, that would go a long way towards motivating me to contribute more… and also making it easier for new people to contribute. :smile:

The other low-hanging fruit is simply to update to a more recent libopenconnect, and start taking advantage of the newly-supported protocols and new API features.

FetFrumos commented 2 years ago

Hi @dlenski , I have another questions:

I need libopenconnect.so for armeabi-v7a architecture, but this [makefile ] supports only armeabi ,arm64-v8a , x86, x86_64 architectures, without armeabi-v7a. why is there no support? because armeabi-v7a is the most common architecture for android.