F-droid will not accept Firefox because it links to Google Play Services.

Your best bet is likely the Orfox project https://guardianproject.info/apps/orfox/ which has an F-droid app listing.

That's two different things: The F-droid main app repository won't accept Firefox because of linkage. The F-droid program happily accepts other repositories (which can have different inclusion policies and are signed by the repository operators).

For example, the guardian project is operating one at https://guardianproject.info/fdroid/repo/; if that link is accessed on Android, the F-Droid program offers to open it, resulting in the addition of the addition of their software to the F-Droid app list.

What I'm suggesting is that Mozilla run their own repository (it's not overly complicated, and can be served from statical pages) to ship official Firefox builds to the F-droid world.

There is even a tutorial by guardianproject and F-droid on how this is done at https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Setup_an_FDroid_App_Repo .

It is really as easy as `fdroid init` / copy .apk into folder / `fdroid update --create-metadata` for a minimum (insecure) version (just tried it locally to install the downloaded .apk), and the tutorial even outlines the few steps towards a production ready system.

Once the repository is added, users can upgrade their Firefox 50 (the last version shipped via the main F-droid repository) seamlessly to the latest release.

Hi chrysn

What @kbrosnan said

I suppose that you could file a bug if you wish; that's about the only thing that I could suggest in additio to what kbrosnan wrote. I'm in support so I don't speak for Firefox engineering but I don't think such a bug would be a high priority unfortunately.

Sorry I can't help further!

...Roland

Until there's something official from Mozilla, I'm shipping more-or-less current builds via my own workaround at http://firefox-fdroid.endor.at/ ; I think that's still a better approach than Mozilla support suggesting Firefox forks or people relying on third party installer apps, but please just add fdroid to the mechanism that populates archive.mozilla.org, distribute the dozen or so files that fdroid generates over the archive, and thus ship Firefox to the non-Google Android world.

Hi

If you select "All Languages and Builds" for either Firefox for Android Beta or Nightly from this official site you should be able to download an .apk of a pre release version you can sideload.

Thanks, Seburo, for the hint. I've abandoned my server in favor of a better implementation by rfc2822 to which I've just offered an implementation of your link.

His implementation also shows better than my old one how easy it would be to set this up at Mozilla, and how many people want to use the FDroid method to get their Mozilla builds.