ffupdater

Firefox-Updater

An Android app to install and/or update Firefox for Android on your device, without using the Google Play Store.

Shows the currently installed Firefox version (if available) and allows to query Mozilla's releases directory site for the latest Firefox for Android release. It also lets a user start downloading the latest release version.

Currently the app is an activity with a two-button GUI. Checks for and displays the most current available version when the "Check available version"-button is tapped. The "Download Firefox" button starts an intent to download the last version from a URL described in Mozilla's README.txt. However, the plan is to move this to an Android service to perform periodical update checks and download/install from within the app itself.

History

Since Mozilla shut down their FTP server on 2015-08-05, non-playstore updates of Firefox have to be done by third-party apps such as this one.

Mozilla now uses a uniform URL to point to the latest release, see their README for details. The current URL for Android is: https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-latest&os=android&lang=multi

I opened a ticket about non-playstore updates with Mozilla in 2015, as did others:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1192279
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1220773

Maintainer:

Tobiwan (now)

Boris Kraut (https://gitlab.com/krt/ffupdater, until April 2019)

Since I left F-Droid (and Android/Smartphones) about a year ago, I am looking for a new maintainer to take over. Unfortunately the upstream issue I opened years ago is still not solved in 2019. While Fennec F-Droid is back in the mainline repo and other binary repos do serve Firefox, some might still prefer this updater. So as I said: Maintainers welcome. The main task should be to test the last few merge requests (especially the background update stuff) and release a new version. New Maintainer: https://notabug.org/Tobiwan/ffupdater

License

FFUpdater -- a simple Android app to update Firefox.
Copyright (C) 2015-2019 Boris Kraut <krt@nurfuerspam.de>

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.