Add a way to share app F-Droid link
Hi,
Before starting, I must say that I read #2265 (closed), #2073 (closed) and !929 (merged)
- Device OS and version: Android 11
- Device model/manufacturer: Google Pixel 5
- F-Droid version (in the About screen): 1.19.1
- F-Droid privileged extension version (if installed):
Usecase
- I'm maintaining a (quite big) list of Android open source app I'm using, to share this list to my friends and other people that are interested. This list is mainly a list of F-Droid links (sometimes Github links where apps are not published on F-Droid)
- to make this list up-to-date, I often (almost daily) add new apps I'm using
- I need a simple way to get the f-droid link of an (installed) app
What did you do? (clear steps if possible)
- I installed an app
- I wanted to share it to friends so they can install it too
- I clicked on share button for this app
- Android gave me the choice of all apps I have that can handle a file, as the share is a file (I'm aware it's a kind of "mixed sharing" with EXTRA_TEXT Intent but I'm speaking in term of end-user here)
What did you expect to see?
I was expecting to see a text that I could copy/paste to my apps list; as a link is a text.
What did you see instead?
A file sharing option
Additional notes
I really think that all of this part have been over-engineered (IMHO). @eighthave you wrote somewhere that you wanted F-Droid to be the simplest possible for classic end-user. It's non-intuitive to have a different behavior for a share option depending on the fact that the app is installed or not. I didn't found this by myself, I "discovered" this strange behavior randomly thanks to @ivangj in this comment.
I'm 100% sure there are a lot of users that are in this case: how to share the link of the app I installed some days ago and that I love to use ? I know for sure at least 2 of my friends that reported this to me. I first thought it was a bug and would be fixed soon. But as the problem was still there I started to look deeper.
Proposal
I suppose you are not opened to the idea of changing this behavior, why not adding this link to the "links" section in the bottom of each app screen ? With links to license, source code and so ? I'm not saying I absolutely want to use the share button to share the link (although it seems logical to me) but I just need an way of have this link.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for this long description !