Any and every Delta Chat app, regardless of the version, struggles to fetch application catalogue or download any webdxc app if the catalogue has been recently fetched: catalogue’s window produces an error[1]. To avoid that, one has to use some circumvention methods.
Error: Failed to fetch apps: connection error: timed out. ↩︎
FYI one might access the store at https://webxdc.org/apps/, then just download the apps as files and send them to chat, they’ll work as usual.
If you set the profile to go over Tor, would that make the store accessible again?
The centralized app cat is currently privileged in the UI; could use of locally-stored and peer-shared apps be made more convenient?
The centralized app cat is currently privileged in the UI; could use of locally-stored and peer-shared apps be made more convenient?
On android version there is an experimental setting to choose the “appstore” url.
android just embeds a website, desktop loads the JSON repository file directly.
I believe we need to decide on an unified way of doing it, so that users can just put in the same url on desktop and android and it works on both platforms.
However it is done internally, the URL to the store should be the same on all platforms (regardless of whether they use the web app or the repo json file directly).
But core team has different priories at the current time, so I would not expect that to be a focus soon, so for now I would go with just downloading and sending the files manually.
peer-shared apps be made more convenient?
iOS has a tab for “last used apps” in the app picker, which means apps that were sent or received by you previously.
That app catalog url may be blocked by IP address, if there is some ‘wrong’ domain hosted on the same IP (like, DC site) (I didn’t check, just guess).
There is no much sense to block that app catalog specifically, so it may work if transferred to another, non-blocked IP.
On practical workarounds, Russia probably won’t block Codeburg or Github, where most of the apps are actually hosted. Might a Codeburg URL for the appcat work well?
It might make sense to make an app-downloader bot that could be hosted anywhere, but you’d have to trust it. A Git bot might be more broadly useful, but again blocking Git seems unlikely.
I think so? AFAIK It’s basically a static website that need to be updated periodically, with webxdc/xdcget: Submission system for webxdc app stores - Codeberg.org.
Also I had a similar idea of a purely static store website that uses GitHub / Codeberg API:
There used to be
but now it’s shut down apparently.
Why not. “This domain is only used by evil messengers, let’s block it”.
The curation of the current appcat is valuable. Perhaps app versions on Git repositories could be endorsed in a machine-readable way? If you trust the endorser, the app is probably safe.
For me it has much more sense to block chatmail servers first.
But it’s my logic, not logic of people who want to block (part of) the internet for the better future of their country.
For subject issue seems like static page on github is a good idea.