Apps not updating when "Unstable updates" setting is unchecked
- Device OS and version: Andorid 8.0.0 and (at least) the later 7 releases
- Device model/manufacturer: Nexus 5X
- F-Droid version (in the About screen): 0.102.3
- F-Droid privileged extension version (if installed):
What did you do? (clear steps if possible)
Went to settings and unchecked the "Unstable updates" checkbox.
What did you expect to see?
Notification whenever a new stable version is released for any installed app.
What did you see instead?
Only some apps generated notification on release of a new version.
Re-checking "Unstable updates" produced notifications of new unstable versions of several apps. There have been, now that I look, newer stable versions released for which I've gotten no notification.
What I believe is happening is that there is no notification of a stable release when there is also in existence an unstable release with a higher version number. As long as this condition exists a newer version of an app will never produce a notification no matter now many stable versions are released. Without notification users are unlikely to ever upgrade their apps. When apps are not updated there is a security problem.
Regardless of the actual mechanism I can tell you I'm running f-droid 0.102.3 and have never gotten a notification of, say, the stable 0.104 release. (In fact because I'm so used to upgrading when notified it was difficult for me to even figure out where to look to see that 0.104 existed and how I might install it. It had occurred to me that I'd not gotten notification of a new f-droid release in a long time but I never looked into it.)
I did not check to see if this bug is already fixed. A related problem continues to exist. Until a stable f-droid version exists in the repo for some time while at the same time there is no unstable later version in the repo, users with unchecked "Unstable updates" will never get notifications of a newer f-droid release. They are unlikely to ever upgrade f-droid and receive the fix to this problem. Or receive a fix to any other f-droid bug. And if users never get a fix to this bug they will probably have apps which never update. Again, a security problem.
So really, I'm reporting 2 closely inter-related problems in a single bug report. Forgive me. I'm not sure where to report the problem regarding how to push a fix to the users and it might not make sense to make such a report because I'm speculating about the root cause.