repo anouncements

I think it would make sense to have an communication channel from repository operators to users. From the top of my head, here are some examples for important information users likely want to get from their repo maintainers:

• policy change announcements
• maintenance windows announcements
• explanations for outages
• announcing changes of apps (eg. when devs. lose signing keys of their apps)
• informing users when a repo shuts down/moves to a different domain
• etc.

I hope you catch my drift. Up until now, F-Droid posted such things to their mastodon and hoped that's enough. In my opinion that's a very bad UX, because our users shouldn't be forced use or care about the fediverse. And even if they use it, they shouldn't have to follow F-Droid to get vital information. But to use F-Droid they will have to use a client app. So I think it makes a whole lot of sense to use that app as communication channel.

I think an easy technical solution could be to specify a rss/atom feed url and just update that feed whenever there's and update in entry.jar. eg.: https://f-droid.org/repo/announcements.rss.en. I guess we could also add announcement support to fdroidserver and ship them via the index, not sure if that's going to take more effort.

I think a good place to present these announcements would be the "latest" screen in F-Droid client. It could be mixed into the timeline of new and updated apps. (I guess another variant could be to display it in the updates section, eg. above or below the list of app updates.)