Common-voice: Publish Android app on F-Droid

[rugk]

Please publish the Android app on F-Droid.

[mikehenrty]

Would love some help with this if anyone is familiar with F-Droid.

[rugk]

https://f-droid.org/docs/Submitting_to_F-Droid_Quick_Start_Guide/ could help here.

[Omniscimus]

I can't find the app on the Google Play store, does it have a different name or is it not on there?

The Common Voice app is currently just a wrapper for the website. I'd say putting it in any app store in its current state wouldn't be very useful, because the user can get the exact same just by navigating to the website in their browser. It might be useful later on if the app gets additional features though.

The Common Voice app would probably be listed as having 'Antifeatures' in the F-Droid store, because:

Tracking – the application tracks and/or reports your activity to somewhere, either without your permission, or by default (i.e. you’d have to actively disable it)

Common Voice uses Google Analytics by default

Non-free Network Services – the application promotes or depends entirely on a non-Free network service

The app uses Amazon cloud storage to save recordings.

[mikehenrty]

Yeah, we never released the Android app, because chrome and firefox on android both allow you to use the microphone on a webpage. The current safari doesn't expose the mic, so we wrote the iOS wrapper app as a workaround. The VC android app was just a quick prototype.

Edit: also note that Safari will be adding getUserMedia very soon, so we might deprecate the iOS app too. Not sure.

[rugk]

However releasing this app on F-Droid could also have some "marketing/advertising effect" as many users interested in FLOSS/"open data/things" likely look on F-Droid for new apps and they may notice your project there…

[est31]

Hi! F-droid developer here (and fan of the common voice project as well as deepspeech :)).

Sadly this app builds on gulp and such apps are not supported by f-droid (yet). See this issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/issues/60

[Rudloff]

Hello,
I would be insterested in packaging your Android app on F-Droid (when it is ready).
We will need tagged releases for this.

[rugk]

See the help article on how to tag releases your releases, so they can be seen on GitHub.

[IzzySoft]

@mikehenrty any chance for the tags?

[Gregoor]

Haven't looked at it yet and we'd like to not have native app wrappers in the future (once safari has feature parity for what we need). Is there sth specific you're missing from the web app?

[IzzySoft]

@Gregoor that ^^ probably goes to @rugk – I'm just asking on behalf of F-Droid as we wait to respond to the packaging request (disclosure: I'm one of the F-Droid maintainers).

[rugk]

What? Are you just suggesting the web app?
That is not the solution, nor the question.

The thing is: You apparently have an Android app on Google Play.
As such, it should also be on F-Droid. For a FLOSS app, there is no reason to (only) be on Google Play.

Edit: Of course, if you pull/delete the Google Play app, this issue also get's obsolete, but unless this is done, this issue is totally valid.

[Gregoor]

Thanks for the clarification. I wasn't intending to say that it's not valid, just that it's not foreseeable that I'll invest time in it (apart from reviewing PRs if anyone is willing to take this on). And yes in the future we'll probably want the native apps to inform the users to use the webapp instead (we might not take them down though).

[IzzySoft]

@Gregoor and tagging releases is investing too much time? Come on…

(as @Rudloff reported above, he'd be willing to package your app – all that's missing is you tagging releases)

[Gregoor]

As a one off kind of thing it wouldn't be too much effort, but as a process change it would be. And from my understanding we'd have to do that continually, wouldn't we?

[rugk]

Just for each release. Doing so is best-practise on GitHub anyway, so it would also help to document the source code.

[Gregoor]

Well, we do have a continuous release model, I think versioning numbers would be pretty arbitrary for us (no interface to semantically version against). I'm definitely happy to look at a PR that would automatically tag each commit, if that helps.

[Gregoor]

Can someone link me to the app on Google Play? It was news to me that we have it there and I also can't find it.

Also from Michael's last comment on this:

Yeah, we never released the Android app

[IzzySoft]

I'm definitely happy to look at a PR that would automatically tag each commit, if that helps.

Tagging each commit isn't what tags are meant for – that would make no sense. Tags are meant to mark "stable points"/"milestones", what usually is called a release or a new version of the app.

[rugk]

I did not check you have an app on Google Play. (I just assumed so, because I thought this is what we are talking about.) If not, this issue is obsolete, as said…

[Rudloff]

Hello,
I understand from https://github.com/mozilla/voice-web/issues/320#issuecomment-458651764 that your goal is to deprecate the Android (and only use a web app).
If so, I think we can close this issue and the F-Droid RFP.

[Gregoor]

Yes, that's very much the goal! The only reason for having an iOS app was a missing Safari API (MediaRecorder) which is in technical preview. Once that's out, we'll deprecate the iOS app.