Principia is now on F-Droid!

Published on the 18th May 2024 at 13:33:04

The Android version of Principia is now available in F-Droid!

In case you are unfamiliar, F-Droid is an alternative app store for Android whose main repository hosts a wide range of Free and open source Android apps built fully from source. While it is a decentralised app store that allows you to host and add custom repositories that may be non-free or not built from publicly available source code, the main repository takes a very strict stance on all apps being Free and buildable from publicly available source code.

As Principia is now an open source project, that made it suitable for inclusion in the main F-Droid repository, and work began on making Principia available for F-Droid since the 2024.02.29 release.

F-Droid, taking a very strict stance on software freedom and advertising potential "anti-features" in otherwise Free software to the user, has listed Principia as having the Non-Free Network Services Anti-Feature. This is simply due to the domain of the main community site (this site right here!) being hardcoded into the app. While the source code for this site is fully available and licensed under AGPLv3, it is undoubtedly a form of lock-in and F-Droid has appropriately marked it as such. The main community site domain will be made into a runtime setting sometime in the future which should hopefully resolve the issue.

Similar to Linux distribution repositories, app packages on F-Droid are built from source code rather than redistributing prebuilt binaries from the developer. While this means you can be sure that any app in F-Droid is built fully from publicly available source code which can be audited, it also means updates on F-Droid may be delayed by up to a week from when we release an update. Nontheless we will make sure that releasing updates to the game goes smoothly for F-Droid so it will not be delayed more than necessary.

Sounds great, link me to it!

Here is the beautiful F-Droid badge, now also visible on the downloads page, which will take you straight to Principia's page on F-Droid.

Note for people currently on the official Principia Android builds wishing to switch over - F-Droid uses a different signing key as part of their packaging process which is incompatible with the signing key for the official Android builds. If you wish to switch inbetween these you will need to fully uninstall Principia first before switching the distribution method. Make sure to backup your user data before doing this.