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by Spittie 3878 days ago
Beside this, Firefox is not really welcomed (and a drop is planned eventually) on F-Droid because it's really complex to build, depends on some closed source libraries (Google Play Services, for example) and has lots of tracking in it (everything is at least opt-out as far as I can tell, but the guys behind F-Droid aren't really keen on any kind of tracking it seems).

It's possible to build it without those problems (see Fennec on F-Droid in fact), but it takes a lot of time for someone to create a recipe, and it's prone to break on every upgrade (and that's why the last version of Fennec on F-Droid is based on Firefox 40).

I don't know if/how many of those problems apply on Firefox OS (I guess at least the complex build environment applies), but that's likely why you'll not find it on F-Droid anytime soon. Unless someone decides to pour lots and lots of energy into this.

More info/sources:

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.mozilla.firefox

https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/org.mozilla.fennec_fdroid

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/metadata/or...

1 comments

Yea, I know all of that.

>It's possible to build it without those problems (see Fennec on F-Droid in fact)

Fennec is stuck on 40 because of difficulties with building it, and even when one person managed to build it, .apk didn't start on others developers phone. A few people tried upgrading it to 41 and all failed, I guess fennec is kill now. I talked about it a few times on their IRC with people responsible for fennec.