Caveat: It isn't available in the app store in the EU, and is instead only available via the developer's marketplace, AltStore¹. As far as I can tell, this genuinely isn't because of greed, but because of a little detail in Apple's EU rules (possibly wrong):

[...] Developers can choose to remain on the App Store’s current business terms or adopt the new business terms for iOS apps in the EU.

Developers operating under the new business terms for EU apps will have the option to distribute their iOS apps in the EU via the App Store, Web Distribution, and/or alternative app marketplaces. [...] Developers who achieve exceptional scale on iOS, with apps that have over one million first annual installs in the past 12 months in the EU, will pay a Core Technology Fee. ²

The problem being, if you're under the old terms, there is no "Core Technology Fee." However, in order to distribute on another marketplace, you must opt into the new terms, meaning you now have to pay the fee even on apps that are distributed on Apple's app store. Thus, if you distribute on the iOS app store in the EU for free, and lets say it gets 2 million installs, you get 1 million installs free... and you now owe Apple half a million dollars.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40067556
2. https://developer.apple.com/support/core-technology-fee/

TL;DR: Update immediately, especially if SSH is enabled. xz versions 5.6.0 & 5.6.1 are impacted. The article contains links to each distro's specific instructions of what to do.

https://news.opensuse.org/2024/03/29/xz-backdoor/

Current research indicates that the backdoor is active in the SSH Daemon, allowing malicious actors to access systems where SSH is exposed to the internet.

In summary, the conditions for exploitation seem to be:

• xz version 5.6.0 or 5.6.1
• SSH with a patch that causes xz to be loaded
• SSH daemon enabled

Impact on distros

• Arch Linux: Backdoor was present, but shouldn't be able to activate. Updating is still strongly recommended.

• Debian: Testing, Unstable, and Experimental are affected (update to xz-utils version 5.6.1+really5.4.5-1). Stable is not affected.

• Fedora: 41 is affected and should not be used. Fedora 40 may be affected (check the version of xz). Fedora 39 is not affected.

• FreeBSD: Not affected.

• Kali: Affected.

• NixOS: NixOS unstable has the backdoor, but it should not be able to activate. NixOS stable is not affected.

• OpenSUSE: Tumbleweed and MicroOS are affected. Update to liblzma5 version 5.6.1.revertto5.4. Leap is not affected.

CVE-2024-3094

As far as I can tell this basically means that all apps must be approved by Apple to follow their "platform policies for security and privacy" even if publishing on a third party app store. They will also disable updating apps from third party app stores if you stay outside the EU for too long (even if you are a citizen of an EU country, with an Apple account set to the EU region).

The idea that preventing app updates is in line with their claims of protecting security is utterly absurd. "Never attibute to malice what can be explained with stupidity," but Apple isn't stupid.

Fossify Gallery on the official F-Droid repo

The removal isn't directly related to the buyout/fork. Simple Gallery was taken off of F-Droid due to a dependency on the nonfree Google VR being discovered by IzzySoft¹ ². Fossify's fork has removed the dependent features to be compliant³.

1. https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/14284
2. https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Gallery/issues/36
3. https://github.com/FossifyOrg/Gallery/issues/36#issuecomment-1873458105

Edit: Updated the page with some cleanup and better navigation. It can now be filtered by OS and GUI/CLI.

Making posts for individual apps tends to only make sense when there's some actually notable event that takes place, so I figured why not just make a page that lists most of the open source applications that I use? So here is that listing. The webpage version has a nice table of contents for at a glance viewing; below is the page translated to Markdown, powered by Markdownr:

Writing

Joplin (Notes)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

I haven't been using it for very long. I used to use Logseq, but I've been finding that the more document/page oriented style of note-taking works better in some cases.

LyX (Math & Documents)

Website • Source Code

LyX is, without a doubt the best writing program. That's probably an exaggeration, but I do really like LyX. It's great for math, and even generates HTML; the first version of this page was drafted in LyX.

Saber (Handwriting/Drawing)

Honestly, I don't use this that much, however it does come in handy for writing/drawing on PDFs and for quickly jotting down equations.

Reading

KOReader (PDF/Documents)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

KOReader has a fairly minimal interface, but is quite versatile. It supports a lot of different document formats (and can also be used as an image viewer).

Tachiyomi (Web Comics)

Not much to say, it reads comics. It even has xkcd.

App Management

App Manager

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

It's rather aptly named.

Aurora Store (Google Play Store)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

Somewhat ironically, this is only useful for installing apps that aren't on this list. However, it does come in handy if you don't have the Google Play Store.

F-Droid (App Store)

Website • Source Code

The quintessential FOSS software center for Android.

Termux (Android Terminal)

Not all software is packaged for Termux, but those that are can be quite handy. For example, Lyx is in the main repositories, and Code-OSS is available in the Termux User Repository

Audio/Video

PipePipe (YouTube)

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

It plays video from YouTube. The non-YouTube services it supports are different, but for those who only use YouTube, the primary differentiator I use it for is the ability to view comment replies.

VLC (Video Player)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

ViMusic (YouTube Music)

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

A straightforward YouTube Music client. It supports offline playback, though there is no way to get songs cached apart from playing through them. It can also be somewhat feature-bare at times.

Internet

Fennec F-Droid / Firefox (Browser)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

The quintessential FOSS browser. Well, maybe Chromium is, except everyone and their aunt has made their own proprietary spinoff of that.... On Android in particular, support for addons is a big plus.

K-9 Mail (E-Mail)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

"Thunderbird for Android" shenanigans aside, it's a nice email client in its own right.

WG Tunnel (Wireguard)

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

It's a Wireguard client for Android. It is mostly quality-of-life features that make it nicer than the official Wireguard client, such as being able to put spaces in tunnel names, search in app exclusion, and being available on F-Droid.

Games

AAAAXY (Platformer)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

A "simple" platformer. I recommend just trying it and exploring how it works yourself.

Forkyz (Crossword Puzzles)

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

You can play crossword puzzles with this app.

Puzzles

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

A description is obviated by the name; it is a puzzle collection. I'm just going to be blunt and say I don't like most of the puzzles, however there are a few that I do quite like, and I recommend giving each of the sub-games a go.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

A fun roguelike. I'm not very good at the whole "stay alive" bit.

Programming

Code-OSS (Editor)

Source Code

It's VSCode, but without proprietary bits. Telemetry may still be enabled by default, however.

Nim (Language)

Website • Source Code

Nim is hands-down my favorite programming language. The documentation is admittedly not the greatest, but it combines a lot of interesting ideas, and it gives a lot of freedom in terms of programming style.

Files

gdu (Disk Usage)

Source Code

It's basically ncdu but in Go. I find that it works better than ncdu on Android/Termux

Syncthing (File Sync)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

Technically it is intended for file syncing, but I ended up using it for backups for the sake of convenience.

Miscellaneous

Arity (Calculator)

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

It's a calculator. Note: There are two applications on F-Droid. One is “Arity,” the original version, and the other is “ArityCalc,” an updated fork (which is listed here)

Barcode Scanner

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

In addition to the obvious capability of scanning barcodes, it can scan and produce QR codes, Aztec codes, Data Matrix codes, and many types of barcode. Admittedly, there's not much to scan QR codes for, but one (bad?) way I use it is as a lazy way to send a short string to another device.

Bitwarden (Password Manager)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

It's a password manager.

Krita (Drawing)

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

I must admit, I'm not much of an artist. However, it's pretty good for basic image editing.

Organic Maps

Website • Source Code • Get from F-Droid

Maps are based on OpenStreetMap and can be downloaded for offline usage.

PDF Doc Scan

Source Code • Get

Self-explanatorily, it scans documents.

Simple Gallery

Source Code • Get from F-Droid

It's a gallery app. Unfortunately, SimpleMobileTools has been acquired by ZipoApps. Although the F-Droid version will probably not be affected, it doesn't seem likely that they will remain maintained. Hopefully one of the forks will be successful.

Unexpected Keyboard

Website • Get from F-Droid

Quite a basic, no-nonsense keyboard. It can take some time to get used to the positioning of the symbols and how to swipe for them.

Are there any FOSS handwriting input methods? I'm looking for something like Gboard's; the closest I've found is Unistroke.

I've played around with Nim before, and thought some of the features such as default values were quite helpful, so it's quite nice that 2.0 is now officially released!

Source code

This is a very basic Lemmy feed viewer, written in Skew.

It doesn't support much as of yet, but it can view instance/community feeds:

/#/beehaw.org

/#/beehaw.org/c/technology

This is a small project I made to view random posts.