After a somewhat extended hiatus, the latest update to IndiePass has finally been published on the Google Play Store and will shortly be available on F-droid as well.
What's changed?
New app name
The first and most obvious change is the app's name. The app formerly known as Indigenous has been rebranded as IndiePass. To accompany this, an updated website for the app has also been published and can be found at indiepass.app
Updated to SDK Platform version 33
From a more technical point of view, the app has been upgraded to version 33 of the Android SDK platform, along with a variety of other minor tweaks and adjustments to ensure that it at least meets the current and incoming requirements of the Play Store in addition to a general spring clean of the codebase.
Visual
From a more visual point of view, I have gone through the UI and addressed a few flagged issues with things like minimum sizes of UI elements for improved accessibility, and converted all icons and graphics used in the app to vectors to improve the app's look and feel on higher resolution screens. In addition, the entire code base was put through a spell check.
Goodbye night theme, hello dark mode
As part of the visual update, there is an updated dark mode that updates the previous night theme. At present the main goal for this is to consolidate the assets within the app and make the app theme more consistent in light/dark mode. This will be refined further in the next couple of updates.
First time use improvements
While this may seem only minor, but there is now an "Add account" button on the opening screen if no account is found. the layout and graphics have been updated on the add account screen as well to match each providers current branding and to make it easier to use.
What hasn't changed (yet)
As the focus of this update was to bring the app up to the current SDK version, and play store requirements, there are still a few issues on the GitHub repo that need looking at. As the codebase has now had somewhat of a spring clean, I will be turning my attention to sorting as many of these as possible in the next few updates.
Future updates
After getting over the issue of updates to the app being rejected by Google, I am going to be submitting updates for the app on a roughly monthly basis for the time being to allow the outstanding issues to be addressed, and for a few newly flagged issues to be added to the backlog and dealt with accordingly.
Other stuff
What happened to the iPhone version?
The original Indigenous app on iPhone was pulled from the app store by Apple in 2022 due to lack of updates. It was not possible to gain access to the listing for the pre-existing version of the app, which had become somewhat mothballed and required significant amounts of work to bring it up to date.
Where's the cross-platform version?
The new cross-platform version of the app is still being actively developed in flutter. As there is a great similarity between the android version and the Flutter based cross-platform version, the core of the cross-platform version will be based on this one.
What about the desktop app?
There will be an update released for the current desktop app that renames that version to IndiePass to ensure the transition to the new name is across the board where possible. Aside from that, development on the Electron based version of the app is pretty much discontinued, and future development of the app targeting Windows, macOS and Linux will be included as target platforms of the new Flutter based version of the app, bringing everything together.
Anything else?
If you like the new update, then great! If you have any comments or spot any glitches, please open an issue on the GitHub repo.
Cheers, Mark
Also posted on IndieNews