App Store Updates

📰 News
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Originally published at: https://nextcloud.com/blog/app-store-updates/

There are and have been a number of changes coming to the Nextcloud App Store and we’d like to cover them in this blog! They are not yet all deployed but they should come soon.

Category and release updates

The Auth category has been superseded by the security category. Your apps will be migrated manually by us once we deploy a new version, new apps uploaded with the <category>auth</category> tag will be transformed automatically to <category>security</category> for now. Please update your app XML since we will remove this at some point!

We also added a games category.

Support for Nextcloud 9 and 10 was removed. This means that the old OCS API (/api/v0) will stop to work and when uploading apps there will be no validation for 9 and 10. You can still publish apps for those versions but your users won’t be able to install them via the Nextcloud server admin interface. However you can still download and install the archives manually. Furthermore the following categories will not be migrated anymore so you must change them in your info.xml: tool, game, productivity, other

User Experience improvements

There is now a releases feed for each app! For example, add https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/nextant instead of https://apps.nextcloud.com/ into your feed reader address input to only see Nextant updates.

Users are now logged in after confirming their email. No additional login needed. And buttons are now all blue instead of a mix of blue and green!

When database.xml validation failed the error message showed info.xml as the culprit. This is now fixed.

Planning deployment

Last but not least, in the app store itself code testing coverage for Python has been added and we bumped it up all the way to 97%, mostly by adding new selenium (frontend) tests. This should result in less issues and bugs when we do releases! Despite this we need some extensive testing because of Django (the web framework) and database schema upgrades. But after we deployed all this successfully we plan to release version 3.0 of the app store.

Remember, the app store is fully open source software and you can contribute!

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We also added a games category.

Will there ever be games for Nextcloud supplied as apps? I think this category never even had an entry in the now defunct Owncloud app store, hence the removal in the Nextcloud store.

Another important feature that is sadly missing is an information in the Nextcloud server app page about the compatibility of apps if a new major Nextcloud release comes out that helps the administrator to determine easily which apps are not (yet) compatible with a new release. Currently the admin has to check for that manually or simply upgrade and see which apps aren’t compatible. I hope this can be improved too.

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Georg registered chess, that’s why it was added.

That can easily be integrated however not an app store topic but server related.

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Georg registered chess, that’s why it was added.

Nice to know. I think that even if Nextcloud isn’t used the standard way as a collaboration software, it could very well be set up to be a (browser based) gaming portal maybe even with multiplayer support.

Aside from that a bit of office fun with small games isn’t that bad either, probably. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

That can easily be integrated however not an app store topic but server related.

I will put a bug report to the core server repository then (if none exists yet).