'Market' app suggestion

[Ciaran Gultnieks]

Hello all,

I've been working for a while on a FOSS 'market' replacement, largely to
scratch a personal itch, as I hate the Google Market with a passion
(further reading: http://ciarang.com/posts/android-market-gripes). I
became aware of the Replicant project last week (I currently run GAOSP,
with some proprietary stuff manually removed) and noticed you have the
same requirement. If it makes sense for you, I'd be delighted if you'd
like to use my solution in some way or another.

My Android application is based on Aptoide, with some inspiration from
APKtor, so the basic look and feel should be familiar. Internally it's
very different though, which is mostly due to my requirement to be able
to support having multiple versions of an application available. (So
that you can install betas, nightly builds, old versions that you prefer
to the new one, versions for 1.5 and 1.6+, etc.)

Additionally, while Aptoide's original design is just a non-Google way
to install apps (and seems to be used most popularly as a source of paid
apps without paying, from what I can tell) this is designed specifically
as a FOSS repository, so things such as License, Source Code links,
Issue Tracker links, are inherent.

There's a lot more I haven't covered in this brief overview (and a lot
of ideas I haven't written down at all yet), but for some further
reading, see:

 http://f-droid.org/posts/f-droid-repository-alpha/  (in particular
about how I plan to have the server binaries built from source,
Deb-style), and
 http://f-droid.org/posts/f-droid-repository-alpha/  (you can try it
out, and get the source of course)

Hope this is of use to you, in some way or other.

Ciaran.