app labels do not update when the device's language changes
If I switch my device to Spanish, I can see that a number of the apps switch their name to the Spanish version, for example "Calculadora" or "Calendario". But looking at the app listing in the Swap flow, it still shows the English app names, while showing the Spanish text.
I looked into it a bit, and the problem is structural in FDroid. The app is built on top of the assumption of a single language. So there is only one field provided for the name of the app: InstalledAppProvider.DataColumns.APPLICATION_LABEL. The swap stuff reuses this structure, and therefore is not set up to handle a separate @string/app_name per language. This only really shows up in the swap flow since with apps coming from f-droid.org, there is only ever a single @string/app_name per app.
So we could do a quick workaround for the swap flow by resolving the @string/app_name for the current Locale in SelectedAppsFragment.AppListAdapter.bindView() using this kind of code:
https://stackoverflow.com/a/18271197
@pserwylo will probably have something to say here :)
Activity
I'm happy to defer to you about usability issues about this, given you have better insight into how and by whom it will be used.
However I may as well drop a few comments for your consideration. Firstly, I think because it is highly localised to the vicinity of the device (usually) then localising apps to one and only one language that is not English is fine. If you are spanish and swapping with someone else, it is somewhat likely they will be Spanish too. In this regard, I think it is a good idea to make use of the localised app_name in the swap workflow.
Secondly, from a technical perspective,I think you will find that it is not actually very easy to do, given that the app_name belongs to the
<application>tag in the index, while the<package>is what actually belongs to the repo (think - single app with multiple apks over many repos). Until we get proper multi-repo support then it is somewhat undeterministic in how it will behave. For example - if you have an app from the F-Droid repo, it will start in English in the main F-Droid UI. If you then start a swap which has another .apk for that same app, then it will (probably - I'd have to check the code) override the app name in the database. Thus, when the user next goes to the main F-Droid interface, it will be localised. Finally, if they subsequently update their repo, then it will change it back to English again. I'll leave it to you as to whether that is confusing enough to be a show stopper, or whether it would still provide a benefit to end users. I genuinly don't have an opinion one way or the other, other than to say - it may be a little bit of code in order to get the repos to be able to contain different app names from eachother and play nice.
Yeah, seems like we have to do some thinking here. And we need the metadata to support multiple languages for all the places in the APK that support multiple languages (like
@string/app_name,@string/app_description, etc.Then it should be pretty easy to handle in the client: just make
InstalledAppProviderfill the database based on the current locale. FDroid should then probably also register some kind of listener to get notified when the language changes, then trigger a rebuild ofInstalledAppProvider.-
tracking the server side of this here: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver/issues/35
Added enhancement and removed bug labels
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@eighthave: Removed the bug and added enhancement, because given the fact the main app lists don't do it, and the talk going on in fdroidserver#35 (closed), it is more of a feature-request type thing.
Have you tested your code with the ability to change F-Droid's language in preferences (only recently added, may have to wait until 0.86-test comes out for it to actually work - unless you are on a a Lollipop device which should work with 0.85-test). Or did you only manage to test with the device language settings?
Added swap label
Milestone changed to 1.0
mentioned in issue #1186