I didn't know Stockholm syndrome existed for mobile devices 😂 View quoted note →

PSA if you see duplicated apps in Zapstore, or apps signed by Zapstore that shouldn't, please go to profile screen > Clear local storage View quoted note →

Zapstore relay is back up again! Post-mortem: A bug in the indexer background process replaced 8 self-published apps with indexed ones (signed by Zapstore indexer). Main symptom for users was seeing duplicates of these apps. Backups were there but faulty so the recovery was difficult and partial. 5 were successfully recovered and 3 were not (Primal by @Primal Developers and Amber and Citrine by @greenart7c3 ). Users please go to your profile screen > "Clear local storage" if you see double entries of some apps! We are working on a feature in the next release to repair these issues without you having to delete the cache. Backups, as well as the original indexer bug, were fixed. View quoted note →

I'll explain: - I'm switching off the relay to prevent bad data from spreading to clients which will cache it - We are working on ways to bust these cache entries in the mobile app but that's not ready yet (next release though) - If I leave the relay on, I will get an avalanche of support requests I can't handle by myself - I'm also the only guy doing devops, which really is a full-time job in itself, and I have an appointment now so I'll take care of it when that's done. At least 2-3 more hours tl;dr: making sure all apps are always up to date is hard. View quoted note →

We just had a data issue in our indexer, it's possible I have to turn the relay off for a few hours. Investigating. Apologize in advance.

We have reached out to Keep Android Open to co-sign the letter:

An Open Letter to Google regarding Mandatory Developer Registration for Android App Distribution

Open Letter to Google Regarding Mandatory Developer Registration for Third-Party App Distribution

After a week, received no response. I read somewhere that they require a Wikipedia page (?) to get listed. But we will add some form of banner to our app and website. (1) Anyone here with a Wikipedia account to create a Zapstore entry? (2) Anyone here with a contact at Keep Android Open? I was happy to see a good soul added Zapstore on here:

List of Android app stores - Wikipedia

If Google does not change its stance before September, assume some apps won't work on Google-controlled devices. For those using Zapstore on the Guulag, we will attempt to identify apps such that users can know/filter beforehand. At the same time, we will take the opportunity for a marketing campaign emphasizing: "Google owns your device and is limiting your options. If you want to fully unlock all apps, use @GrapheneOS or other alternative ROM." Hoping to leverage this insanity against their control. View quoted note →

After these important infrastructure improvements, our next big challenge is communities (next 4-6 weeks). Anyone is able to run one, and discoverability will be first-class in the app and webapp. Instead of managing relays, Blossom servers, and tweaking a bunch of technical knobs, no: those are prepackaged in a community spec. We are going to push the permissionlessness hard. Stay tuned, it's going to be awesome.

Re: app updates. On the indexer side, we deployed a demand-driven schedule meaning that your requested updates trigger a check - instead of being cadence driven (e.g. every day). This means more efficient and faster updates across the board! The indexer also now does takeovers, so if a developer stops publishing for whatever reason, the indexer acts as a safety net so you don't miss updates! If the developer had cryptographically linked their APK certificate, then we can keep publishing on their behalf.

Attention developers. We're relentlessly lowering the bar for publishing. If your npub is rejected (usually happens with new npubs) you no longer need to ask for whitelisting. Simply add a 'pubkey' YAML property in your zapstore.yaml config file (must be at root of your repository, pushed) with your npub. That's it! (Malicious apps will swiftly get removed and the entire user from the forge, permanently blacklisted.)

✨ New feature (in alpha!) Something that many asked for a long time. You can now suggest apps to the Zapstore indexer. Simply search for the full repository URL like https://github.com/user/repo If you get no results back, it will be queued for indexing in the background, and if it has valid APK in its releases, it should shortly be available. Github only for now. Try it out!

🚀 zsp publishing tool, just released 0.4.0 Lots of fixes and a publishing flow to link your APK certificates to your Nostr identity, implementing our new NIP-C1! I encourage you to start signing these, it will strongly help improve trust signals. It also works outside the flow, via: zsp identity --link-key

GitHub

GitHub - zapstore/zsp: Publish apps to relays

Publish apps to relays. Contribute to zapstore/zsp development by creating an account on GitHub.

Aurora Store release repository (auroraoss.com) has blocked Zapstore indexer IP, so no updates from them. Github being more open than a FOSS project, who would've guessed.