Contribute

The project is entirely developed and maintained by volunteers. You can help in the following ways:

Report Problems

If you experience problems with the site or client software, you can report them in the Issue Tracker, or discuss them in the Forum or on IRC (#fdroid on freenode).

Submit Applications

If you see an application missing from the repository (after reading the inclusion policy below), please feel free to submit it via the dedicated Submission Queue section of the forum. If you have the technical skills required, you can also put together the relevant metadata and submit that via the git repository, which will drastically speed up the inclusion of the application.

The manual should help with this.

Translate

The client application is available in many languages, but if yours is not included, or if it needs updating or improving, please create an account in the translation system (powered by Pootle) and make your changes.

If your language is not listed, ask in the Forums and we will add it. There’s a dedicated forum section for translation.

Help with Development

There are two git repositories hosted at Gitorious – one for the Android client application, and one for the server tools and associated metadata files for applications. The easiest way to contribute to development is to make clones of these projects and submit merge requests. If you are making large changes, it would be good to discuss them on IRC or in the forum first, to ensure they fit with the direction of the project, and do not clash with or duplicate work already in development.

For working with the server project, it’s a good idea to read the manual.

Inclusion Policy

All applications in the repository must be Free and Open Source software – for example, released under a GPL or Apache license. Every effort is made to verify that this is actually the case, both by visual inspection of the source, and by building the application from the published source. If in doubt about a license, please refer to this list.

Some software, while being Free and Open Source, may engage in practices which are undesirable to some or all users. Where possible, we still include these applications in the repository, but they are flagged with the appropriate ‘AntiFeatures’, and not displayed by default. In the client, you can enable the display of applications which such AntiFeatures if you choose. We recognise the following categories of AntiFeature:

• Ads – the application contains advertising
• Tracking – the application tracks and reports your activity to somewhere, either without your permission, or by default (you have to actively disable it)
• NonFreeNet – the application promotes or depends entirely on a non-Free network service
• NonFreeAdd – the application promotes non-Free add-ons
• NonFreeDep – the application depends on another non-Free application (e.g. Google Maps, Market) for its operation

Even though software in the above categories can be included, when appropriately flagged, it is frequently the case that software with these features is actually not entirely FOSS. For example, advertising and tracking user activity is often enabled via non-free binary libraries which we cannot include.