Mitch

An unofficial Android client for itch.io · By gardenapple

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F-Droid integration?

A topic by divVerent created Jan 27, 2023 Views: 245 Replies: 1

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divVerent1 year ago (1 edit)

It’d be nice if Mitch could also somehow support games that are on F-Droid.

Right now, I sure could upload an APK I made myself whenever I also upload to other places, however, this APK then won’t have F-Droid’s signing key, so my game being present as download via Mitch will confuse F-Droid as they use the same app identifier but a different signing key.

On the other hand, most Mitch users probably also have F-Droid installed, so they don’t really need Mitch to perform updates of the games - after all, F-Droid will already take care of that. So if Mitch could somehow support something like a tag in the game description, or even just look for F-Droid URLs in there, and then offer them as a direct download (can just externally link to F-Droid’s APK, no need to go via their app) so in Mitch it behaves just like a game where an APK was uploaded on Itch - that’d be best I think.

So any chance this could be done? Thanks!

gardenappleDeveloper1 year ago

So to be clear, you want Mitch to check if there’s a link to F-Droid on a game’s page, and if so, redirect the user to F-Droid, instead of simply installing it? That would make things more confusing, not less. Not to mention the added code complexity.

I’ve had Mindustry on my phone for quite a while now with numerous updates received through Mitch, and F-Droid never seemed to have trouble with this. I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure F-Droid is smart enough to handle these use cases, as it also often co-exists with Google Play, Aurora Store, and other apps. If not, then as far as I’m concerned, that’s F-Droid’s problem. I know there is a way to check which “app installer” was responsible for installing an app.

On the other hand, most Mitch users probably also have F-Droid installed, so they don’t really need Mitch to perform updates of the games.

The main F-Droid repo can be slow to update. Also certain features might be removed to meet their policies. (granted, these “features” might be things like Google Analytics, but still, in general we can’t assume that the F-Droid version will be equivalent to whatever’s on itch.io)