F-Droid inclusion

[shuvashish76]

Would you consider publishing this app on F-Droid please?

According to Izzy scanner report :

Offending libs:
---------------
* Play Install Referrer Library (/com/android/installreferrer): NonFreeDep,NonFreeNet,Tracking
* Android Market (/com/google/android/finsky): NonFreeNet
* Google Mobile Services (/com/google/android/gms): NonFreeDep
* Firebase (/com/google/firebase): NonFreeNet,NonFreeDep
* Sentry SDK for Java (/io/sentry): Tracking

5 offenders.

As Izzy pointed out there, any possibility of keeping FOSS flavour without these libraries for F-Droid?

[pimterry]

Hi @shuvashish76 - sure, I'd happily welcome PRs to support this if you're interested in that.

That said, I should note that this app isn't primarily distributed via the Play store anyway. In most cases, it's used the the ADB activation option in HTTP Toolkit, which directly installs the app via ADB itself. I agree it might be nice to have it explicitly available via F-Droid too, but you can use this app on devices without the Play store anyway.

[shuvashish76]

Sorry, I can't help since I'm not a dev. :(
But F-Droid maintainers will take care the publishing part if you could provide the FOSS flavour.

[pimterry]

Ok - I'll keep this open, but I'm not going to have time to do this myself I'm afraid.

If anybody is sufficiently interested to implement this, I'll happily review & merge a PR for the changes required but I'm afraid it's not a priority for me. From my POV and I think for most HTTP Toolkit users, it wouldn't add very much value because - as above - the app isn't generally distributed via app stores at all, so alt stores aren't really useful. If you or anybody else would get value from this though, enough that you're interested in implementing it, go for it! Happy to answer questions about the preferred approach or discuss any questions in that case, just reply here.

For anybody who is interested in this, you might also be interested in just downloading the APKs directly. You can do that here: https://github.com/httptoolkit/httptoolkit-android/releases/latest

[cHAuHaNz]

the app isn't generally distributed via app stores at all

@pimterry can you help me understand the usage of this then? Do we have a particular case when user is redirected to store?

httptoolkit-android/app/src/main/java/tech/httptoolkit/android/MainActivity.kt

Lines 177 to 187 in 3feedb7

	// If not, check if this is a post-install run, and if so configure automatically
	// using the install referrer
	launch {
	val firstRunParams = app.popFirstRunParams()
	if (
	firstRunParams != null &&
	firstRunParams.startsWith("https://android.httptoolkit.tech/connect/")
	) {
	launch { connectToVpnFromUrl(firstRunParams) }
	}
	}

[pimterry]

If you scan the QR code from the desktop with a normal QR code scanner, without the app already installed, it sends you to the play store to install it (in that scenario, we can't install the app via ADB). What I meant by "the app isn't generally distributed via app stores at all" really is that nobody discovers the app via the play store - they just get sent there directly as a download source. Since we don't know what's on the user's device we couldn't use F-Droid or any other store for this, we basically just have to use the most popular store available.

It's not a very common flow really, most users use ADB setup, and I suspect when the QR code is used it's often used on devices that do already have the app installed anyway. I haven't actually tested the post-install referrer logic in years so tbh I'm not 100% sure it still works, but it's not actually critical - if it doesn't, you just end up inside the app and you scan the code again.