[ap-andersson]

In general F-Droid works well for me even if I have only maybe 2-3 apps that I get from there. I think it's good that it exists.

There could be some improvements on the process of adding an app though. I recently made a very small app for myself that I thought "maybe a couple of people would find this useful, I should add it to F-Droid".

I started by reading their docs on how to add a new app. I created an account on gitlab, forked their repo and added my app. Their pipeline failed without telling me why. After reading and re-reading everything a bunch of times I had to give up and look for help. The instructions said to fix all pipeline problems before creating a merge request.

So I go to the contact page where there are a bunch of options. I chose IRC and join. Ask for help. No answer or any message sent in the channel for the next 24 hours. At this point I am getting a bit irritated and are thinking about truly giving up. Then eventually someone answers in the channel and says "create a merge request and someone will help you". Which is what the docs said NOT to do. Fine. Ok. I will create it.

I go to Gitlab and chose the right template for the merge request. And now I get a whole bunch of new instructions and questions that I have to answer that the docs never mentioned. And it even mentions in that template that I should TRY to fix pipeline problems, or someone will help me (still going against official docs on their site). Since there was a bunch of questions I would have to look up to properly answer I did not have the time to do it right away... And I still have not done it. Its on a todo-list.

tl;dr: F-Droid works okey but the whole process of submitting a new app for someone that has not gone through it before could be made way better with some updated and unified instructions.

[iggldiggl]

> I started by reading their docs on how to add a new app.

Did you stumble across https://f-droid.org/docs/Inclusion_How-To/, or did you miss that page somehow? Because there it mentions the Submission Queue as the simpler, if somewhat slower route to adding an app. For the submission queue, you just need to fill out the pertinent data in an issue ticket and then follow along with any further instructions you might subsequently receive.

[ap-andersson]

To be honest I had forgot that it was an option. I zeroed in on the other alternative from the get go since I was the developer of the app and its very limited in its usefulness. Did not want to create work for others when I thought I could easily do the work :)

[greazy]

This is my experience with community driven open source projects and while its frustrating, what I like is that I can improve the process.

Did you ever consider submitting an issue regarding the docs?

[ap-andersson]

To be honest, not really. I wanted to first successfully get my app published before even thinking about that. I would need to explain WHAT to improve and HOW to improve it for it to be useful and that I cannot do until I am more familiar with the project. But it is a good point.

[daghamm]

You can run their pipeline locally with better observability.