ffupdater

Firefox-Updater

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

Periodical the app will check for updates and will display a notification when a new update is available. The time interval of the automatic update checks can be configured.

Screenshots

Technical detail

Internally the Mozilla API will be queried.

When an update is available, the user will be redirect to https://download.mozilla.org/?product=[fennec-latest|fennec-beta-latest,fennec-nightly-latest]&os=[android|android-x86]&lang=multi. For example https://download.mozilla.org/?product=fennec-beta-latest&os=android-x86&lang=multi.

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/>.