F-Droid apk issues
nikolowry opened this issue · 9 comments
Very excited to see a FOSS pdf-viewer app finally it F-Droid, so thank you! However when trying to install from the F-Droid app is impossible, as there is no download link and the app itself is greyed out in the apk list.
Manually downloading the apk from https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdid=org.ninthfloor.copperpdf wasn't helpful either, as when trying to install and error with message "There was a problem parsing this package" gets thrown:
The app is probably grayed out because it's not compatible with your device. Which version of Android are you running?
Anyway there are other free/libre pdf viewers available on f-droid, check "document viewer" and mupdf. The major advantage of this app is security, as the PDF library is written in a memory safe language (javascript) and the app itself requires no permissions.
Arm64 v7.0.0
What build targets are currently defined? And those apps UI are severely dated, was looking for a FOSS Google PDF Viewer replacement.
CopperPDF currently targets API level 25, that is Android 7.1.
Sorry to open a ticket then - will try again after I compile 7.1
CopperPDF currently targets API level 25, that is Android 7.1.
But why? It's unnecessarily limiting. You can target API 25 whilst setting min-apk to 19 (which I think is what webkit requires per https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.4.html#BehaviorWebView)
To be honest I don't know, it was like that when I forked the app. As CopperheadOS is currently based on Nougat 7.1 they're not interested in anything below that.
I did a couple of tests with the emulator, the app seems to work fine with api 23, but not with api 22. It opens, doesn't crash, but can't display PDF files. If you see any obvious reason for which it fails to run on api <23 let me know, otherwise I'll set minSdkversion to 23.
I'm not familiar enough with that pdf library to know what it depends on, but if 23 works, then it's better already. Cheers
Done
My Xperia device had some problems with the binaries released by Sony when I compiled to 7.1.1 yesterday - so had to roll back to 7.0.0.
So I decided to build CopperPDF locally to avoid using Google PDF Viewer and can confirm a successful build with the the following in app/build.gradle defaultConfig:
minSdkVersion 21
targetSdkVersion 25
I didn't see any changes to app/build.gradle and can make a pull request if needed.