Certificate issues with Android apps on old AlienDalvik ("AAS") on Jolla1, Jolla C, Jolla Tablet and Xperia X, e.g with F-Droid

Applications
#1

So I settled down with SFOS 4.6 on Jolla C, but now I’m having issues with getting extra Android apps installed.

I installed F-Droid 1.12 from the Jolla Store but it is empty. F-Droid shows no apps and fails to fetch data from any repo with this error:

f-droid java.security.cert.CertPathValidatorException: Trust anchor for certification path not found.

I guess it has something to do with outdated certificates. How do I properly solve this?
Without F-droid I cannot move any further, eg. get Aurora store, more apps etc.

#2

Try downloading from

#3

Yes, this is a known issue for many Android apps on the AOSP 4.1.2 based AlienDalvik (Jolla 1) and the AOSP 4.4.4 based one (Jolla C, Jolla Tablet, Xperia X). I am at it, but procrastinated that, because I have nicer things to do in my holidays. I guess, one has to download and install AOSP’s recent certificate bundle, how exactly that is done is still open for research (from my perspective, maybe someone else is experienced in doing that for AlienDalvik).

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#4

Here’s a nice list of options to try:

Not sure which path has the most likelyhood to success…

Note that the method would apparently have to be different on 4.1 (J1) and 4.4 (others).

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#5

BTW, the Android System Settings launcher icon seems to only work with SailfishX, which has a newer Android support. On Jolla C with its AOSP 4.4 it doesn’t work. Still investigating…

#6

Thanks for noticing! I’m now very much hesitant to update my ‘old’ C1. It’s okay running with 4.5 (Struven ketju) OS version and F-Droid + other Android apps work fine.

#7

Try installing 1.2 (fdroid classic) it’s the last version supporting 4.4 F-Droid Classic | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

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#8

After some extensive googling around I managed to install the ISRG Root X1 certificate (as described here), and the Let’s encrypt test site says everything is ok and valid.

That didn’t help F-Droid in any way though. It still threw either ‘no mirrors available’ or the aforementioned certificate error (depending on the switch for old/new XML format in Settings).

@ throwaway69, you advice worked well! F-droid classic really fixed the issue. Thanks!

P.S. The store is still nearly empty, very few apps are available. Not sure if there’s anything I can do with it.

#9

Maybe enabling te Archive repo helps.

#10

It says “Error Getting Index file” although the URL is valid…

#11

I have added the new root cert as I described in Root cert problems on AppSupport 4.4.4

I had F-Droid v1.12.1 installed already before (no newer compatible version seems to be available).

Updating repos works fine (it takes many minutes and I don’t think it’s only the network that it is so slow).

Enabling and updating archive repos will lead to an out of memory error even on a newly booted device with browser, phone, and many other services stopped. (Seen from the logs, the application just silently closes. According to the log it was the Java heap, I guess that size cannot be increased. There is an ancient Android option for large heap apps, I have no idea whether Alien Dalvik would support that.) So I guess to load archived apps that have no compatible version in the default repo anymore, you need to download them from the repo using a Web browser or curl.

P.S. I don’t have the instructions to see the mentioned log or the link to a Web interface to the F-Droid repo handy right now. If someone wants them I should be able to dig them out again some other day.

Edit: KOReader is one of the few useful apps (IMHO…) that still gets updated regularly and only requires Android 4.3. Just saw that it has been updated again in July and updated it. That went fine, but the new version does no longer run. That’s an increasingly common problem also with other apps, one needs to maintain a blacklist (or interact with upstream…) Need to dig out the older version again…

#12

This is correct, the original F-Droid client app v1.12.1 is the last one which supports Android 4.x. You may try if the F-Droid client apps F-Droid Classic and / or G-Droid work better; the current versions of both still support Android 4.x.
(I documented all this here: olf (Olf0) (Olf0) / SailfishX on Xperias · GitLab)

Updating repos works fine (it takes many minutes and I don’t think it’s only the network that it is so slow).

Correct, it is the F-Droid repos scanning which is so slow.

Enabling and updating archive repos will lead to an out of memory error even on a newly booted device with browser, phone, and many other services stopped.

A crude workaround for this is to only enable a single repository at a time. The F-Droid archive repo is the largest hence most problematic one, unfortunately.