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Hello people of this lovely community!
Take a seat, I have amazing, exciting news to tell: We forked Otter, the amazing Android™ App built by Antoine for Funkwhale. Its now called Funkwhale for Android™, or FFA.
Huge thanks for Antoine!
For us its really to make clear the hole app would not have been possible without the work of Antoine/apognu. He did an amazing work, designing and engineering this App. Its serves a perfect job, has a small memory footprint and is built using modern technologies. Its maybe one of the best free software Android™ applications I've ever used. If you can manage it, you can sponsor him on his Github page!
Why do you fork?
Well, there is a simple reason: Antoine is not responding in the repository, in the chats or to private emails. I tried to reach him for months and there is no reaction. This is not a problem at all, everyone needs a break sometimes, especially in this crazy times. But we have a problem coming up: Version 1.1 of Funkwhale was supposed to drop support for our old authentication system, making it only possible to authenticate third party apps using OAuth. Otter does not support this. This basically means Otter wont work anymore as soon as we release 1.2. Even worse, some admins might consider not updating Funkwhale to use the Android™ application, which might cause security issues and incompatibilities.
This is why we are hard forking the application. We don't have any bad intentions, we just want to take care for our ecosystem. As soon as Antoine is available again and send us a message, we will welcome him onboard again or talk about how to proceed!
Current state
It all started with @ryan_harg asking on Mastodon if anybody was successful to setup an building environment for Otter. I just pinged him back to let him know I was already considering to fork Otter due to the described situation. I stated, I'd welcome him onboard at this project. This was two, maybe three weeks ago and a lot of stuff already happened. We setup a basic build pipeline, thanks to @creak, @ryan_harg did a full rebranding of the App, @egon0 built up our self hosted F-Droid repositories to ship our testing builds. Additionally some bug fixing and housekeeping was done, too.
How to contribute
This project is quite new and we can use any help we can get. We built on a solid base, nevertheless there is a lot of stuff to do. If you are an Android™ Developer or know somebody, we would be keen to get in touch! We need some experience in this area. You can help us with translations at Weblate. You can join our chat at Matrix. You can get our development builds to do some testing here. Please give us feedback, here in the forums or the chat. But keep in mind thats just an development build, things can break!
I want to thank everyone who made this possible! This is an amazing and exciting development and I am looking forward to the future of this project. Get in touch, get on board, enjoy!
