Updated to OS 5.3, F-Droid horked

Just updated my Fairphone 3+ to iodéOS 5.3 from 5.1 (I know 5.4 is now available but I already had the 5.3 download sitting waiting for about a week). A couple of snags:

The update process didn’t spend a long time on the finalising app installations part like usual, it only took a few seconds. The subsequent reboot sat on the iodéOS logo screen for several minutes which was pretty disconcerting as I worried the phone was bricked. But it did eventually come up.

I opened F-Droid soon afterwards and noted there were no new updates. Today, twelve hours later, F-Droid crashes on every launch. I rebooted, no change. Any reason this might happen? Anybody else having crashes, and with 5.3?

Had a similar issue with F-droid and FP4 a few updates back. Iode is not doing too well with app store support in FP’s it seems. Try to uninstall the F-droid and get the apk yourself from the official F-droid website. This helped me at least.

I thought I may as well first try updating to 5.4 and see if that miraculously fixed F-Droid the same way that 5.3 miraculously broke it. But sadly no, same error.

Uninstalled F-Droid. There’s an option under Pre-installed apps to reinstall - I don’t know if that takes the same iodé source or downloads it from elsewhere? In any case I downloaded it from the official F-Droid site and installed. It works again, but of course my one or two additional repos are lost and have to be re-added.

I don’t recall whether there was an iodé repo included in the iodé version of F-Droid containing their own modified versions of apps?

To solve issues with preinstalled apps, uninstalling and reinstalling them is not recommended, as it removes some permissions. In particular, network access may be forbidden, and it is necessary to go to app info, Mobile data usage, and uncheck/check Allow network access.

The good way is to clear app data : in app infos, Storage and cache, clear storage.

So: if you reinstall the embedded FDroid, allow its network access, it should work.

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A few days after my last post, having successfully installed the standard F-Droid version instead, it suddenly crapped out. I was in the middle of updating a few apps within, one of which was F-Droid itself. A bit stupid really that the official version they make available on their website was 1.17 and straight after installing it offers to update to 1.20. Anyway, as it was in the course of doing that update it crashed. And suddenly, the F-Droid icon was gone from my home screen and apps menu. I rebooted, nothing. It had completely vanished!

I went back into Pre-installed apps and selected the iodé version of F-Droid for reinstall. And that worked, despite it not having worked before, even after clearing the cache. And it seemed to pick up my old repos again.

All somewhat inexplicable. Alas, it instils trepidation rather that anticipation each time I see a new iodé update available because too many have brought something broken. The 5.4 release is now generally behaving itself on my FP3 but for one new small quirk that I’ll post about elsewhere.