In France they for some reason like to be free and in control. So the French culture is much supportive towards any free and open approaches to life. This obviously also includes software and technology so in France there exist a large crowd trying to push and promote the use of open source and free software. Like fx. April (Association pour la Promotion et la Recherche en Informatique Libre = Association for the Promotion and Study of Free Computing, see also april.org) and Framasoft (framasoft.org). And companies have found niches to operate in this technology field, like Bootlin, /e/ (Murena), Linagora and also different events regarding free software are held. One such is the Capitol du Libre held in Toulouse 16.-17. November (also hosting a MiniDebConf) at which the CEO of Bootlin are going to give a talk about Android mobile applications. He asked for input on applications people use on Linkedin, this is my answer;

Noticed your talk earlier today, good topic for a general public event.
I use free software mobile applications (mostly from F-Droid) whenever I can. License is the prime criteria when I choose an application.

My daily drivers are:

• Aegis – MFA/TOTP
• AntennaPod – audcast/podcast
• Etar – calendar
• Fennec – firefoxy browser
• K-9 Mail – mail client (to become Thunderbird)
• KISS Launcher – no fuzz find-what-you-need launcher (no widgets!)
• OpenTracks – fitness tracker
• OsmAnd – navigation and OSM inspection
• QKSMS – no frills texting
• Vespucci – contribute to OSM
• yetCalc – math!

Worth mentioning:

• Binary Eye – QR-code++ scanner
• Cache Cleaner – reclaim space wasted
• Commons – contribute to WikiMedia
• Jami – GNU messaging (that we want to use, but no one is there…)
• Muzei – wallpaper swapper
• MyHackerSpace – finding fellow nerds
• NewPipe – 3rd party video client
• NextCloud – access the files (want this to be a daily driver)
• OpenFoodFacts – know your meal
• OSMTracker – track for OSM
• SimpleSSHD – fetch pixs using rsync
• SkyMap – locate celestial objects
• Termux – terminal and friends
• URLCheck – intercept and modify link intents
• VLC – just video
• WLED/WLED Native – control those blinkenlights

The support request replicated below was posted as ticket #20427 on Micro:bit support on 2019-01-31 22:19 CET spawned by discussion in F-Droid RFP #662 about inclusion of the official Micro:bit Android Companion application in the free software application store F-Droid.

Hi at Micro:bit Educational Foundation.

We are wondering a bit in the F-Droid free software community (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/issues/662) whether it is worthwhile for us to try to loosen the official Android companion application (https://microbit.org/guide/mobile/#og-app) from its non-free dependencies to make it available in the free software application store F-Droid (https://f-droid.org/).

This leads to a couple of questions you can hopefully help answering;

1) Do you regard the application as alive and supported?

The latest release of the application was v2.0 2017-01-17 (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.microbit) and the publicly available code base (https://github.com/Samsung/microbit/) seems to have been completely abandoned. Only two commits were ever made by Samsung and no involvement with the community has been seen at all.

2) How come the big difference in maturity between the iOS and Android mobile applications?

It seems like the iOS application has received some more attention seeing regular updates through to v3.0.2 released 2018-11-01 (https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/micro-bit/id1092687276?mt=8). Also it appears to have a much wider fetaureset (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.samsung.microbit&reviewId=gp%3AAOqpTOGpgo4CF2qrry4qWqLXyj0TZaEEJcrTB-yZ61o4nJbqhq-2mBojlYQJP7BzdkAzseGaLD1sVO9fBv1R3sY) developed along the way by Insight Resources (http://www.insightresources.co.uk/microbit/index.html).

The Android application appears to have been more of a one-off project from Samsung having all sorts of issues especially with Bluetooth that has never been attended to (http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2016/04/mobile-microbit/, https://support.microbit.org/support/solutions/articles/19000041104-diagnosing-bluetooth-problems-android).

3) Is there a plan to bring the application in better shape?

Some activity can be seen in repository forks and branches from the original Samsung committer ailrohit (https://github.com/Samsung/microbit/compare/master…ailrohit:school_project) and microbit-sam (https://github.com/Samsung/microbit/compare/master…microbit-sam:partial-flash) identifying as being from the foundation but none of this work seem to be included in releases yet.

4) If a freed fork is made for inclusion in F-Droid would you be willing and able to integrate the changes into the official sources?

F-Droid prefers an upstream source which can be directly built without non-free dependencies using an appropriate set of build options. This greatly simplifies maintenance and build efforts. A forked repository is already in place at the foundation’s Github organization (https://github.com/microbit-foundation/microbit-android) but is at the moment even with the stale Samsung repository.

Thanks for any clarifications you can provide.

Regards,
Mikkel