Fake Dawn is my Android app to wake up gently (more details in this past blog post). I recently uploaded a new version (1.1) on Google Play; it fixes some bugs that were reported to me through the Developer Interface by Android users. Fake Dawn is Free Open Source Software (project page), and because of this some people suggested that I should put it on F-Droid.
F-Droid is a project that includes:
- an Android app that acts as an alternative market, and
- a web server that compiles and distributes open source apps.
Nicolas Raoul created a diagram showing its structure synthetically. F-Droid can’t be installed through Google Play (because it’s an alternative to it, and for this is not compatible with the Google license agreements), so it must be installed by downloading its apk file through their site. When it is installed, it can be used to install any open source application in their repository.
In order to add Fake Dawn to F-Droid I followed this guide, forking their project, preparing the meta-data information for their repository, and then requesting a merge of my modifications. After several days Fake Dawn is now in F-Droid repository.
For my next steps in Fake Dawn development I want to:
- Clean up the code and its design
- Prepare a test project to automatically verify as much functionality as I can
- Improve support to older phones
- Improve usability
Entries
Himanshu Arora
2013/01/06
From bare metal coding to android programming! Way to go
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eligoldweber
2013/03/04
I am in the process of learning more about mobile app development. This was very interesting. What do you think the major differences are between F-droid, and the market?
Balau
2013/03/04
There’s the obvious difference that you must have everything open source to go with F-Droid.
Then in F-Droid there’s a procedure (both in terms of code and in terms of human interaction) that must be done in order to make your app available, but once it is, the upload of new versions is automatic: I didn’t have to do anything to upload FakeDawn 1.2 on F-Droid, it just appeared after I tagged the release version.
Then the market has cool statistics and error reporting.
Other than that, the two “markets” can be managed by the app developer at the same time, it’s not a big problem.
eligoldweber
2013/03/05
Thank you for replying so soon. I am actually in the process of writing my high school senior capstone project on mobile app development. I was wondering if you might be willing to answer some questions about the process you used to create FakeDawn.
Balau
2013/03/05
I am a beginner in Android development: this is my first app and I also have little more than 1 year of experience on Java, I did little more than following the official tutorials in order to develop my app. If you think I can answer to some of your questions then feel free to ask, maybe it’s better by e-mail depending on your questions.