Hello - today i left a review of the android app for newsblur after a few months of use (have mostly been relatively pleased with the experience and planning on upgrading from the free version, but was still having one specific issue). for basic background, i mostly use newsblur on desktop, but use the android app when away from my pc - which has been a lot over the past month and a half.
i originally downloaded the google play version of newsblur, and later switched to the fdroid version when i discovered it was available. i left a review on the play store bc i assumed (oops) that the versions were the same, and fdroid doesn’t have a review system.
i received a dev response saying that the issue i was having had already been fixed in the latest version, which was puzzling because i thought i had the latest version. this prompted me to check the version numbers against each other, and i discovered that the latest fdroid version seems to be outdated.
will the fdroid version of the app be updated to the latest? i can switch to the google play version if absolutely necessary, but i prefer to get my apps from fdroid when possible.
Good news — I tracked down the root cause and submitted a fix to F-Droid.
After version 13.8.0, the Android app’s build system was migrated to use Gradle version catalogs, which deleted the file that F-Droid’s auto-update bot was monitoring for new versions. So it simply stopped detecting new releases after that point.
Once merged, F-Droid should automatically pick up future releases going forward. In the meantime, if you need the latest version you can grab it from Google Play or build from source.
Fixes auto-update detection — UpdateCheckData now points to app/build.gradle.kts instead of the deleted Config.kt. This is the
critical fix that ensures the F-Droid checkupdates bot will automatically detect future releases from your git tags.
Adds build entry for 13.11.4 — Updated prebuild sed commands for:
Found the issue and submitted a fix. The F-Droid build was failing because their prebuild sed commands were referencing code markers that no longer exist after the review code was refactored to Kotlin. The sed pattern was deleting from a start marker to the end of the file, wiping out most of the class.
I restructured the code so all Google Play review logic lives in a single file (InAppReviewHelper.kt) that F-Droid can replace with a no-op stub, instead of relying on fragile sed patterns. Submitted a merge request to the fdroiddata repo: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/35892
The merge request is live:
FYI