make the apps "source" easily distinguishable (at the list view)

[DJCrashdummy]

Prerequisites
this is a loosely related follow up on #129.

Describe the feature
the categories (and filter) features are nice but IMHO Obtainium lacks an automatic filter/indicator of the apps "source".
for most apps the developer/packager is shown at the list, which is perfectly fine and important, but as i want to use/avoid particular app "sources", i would like to see at a glance from which "source" the apps are installed (without the need to open the detail view of every app one by one).

Describe alternatives you've considered (if applicable)

• i can categorize the apps manually, but this workaround is error prone and cumbersome if you have more than a few apps.
• a slightly better workaround is to use the filter in the list view, but as there are now 20 "sources" supported, it also got cumbersome to go through them one by one.

it should not be that harsh as it may sound: the category feature is more or less useless to me because everything has to be done manually (which i don't intend to do for >100 apps); and the filter feature may be interesting for some specific use cases but also isn't really useful for easily distinguishing the apps "sources" anymore.

Additional context
i'm not 100% sure what would be the best way to implement this: either by an additional line or an icon/symbol at the list view or, similar to the categories, by just a colour coding on the left/right side.
...make all of it optional or even implement more than one way and let the user decide via settings?
-> and then the cherry on the cake would be an additional option for sorting after the "source".

[DJCrashdummy]

BTW: it is somehow unfortunate to call them app "sources", especially in context of FOSS... IMHO a better name would be app distributor.

[ImranR98]

Seems like a very niche use case (not sure what you mean by "i want to use/avoid particular app 'sources'" - wouldn't you avoid adding apps from those sources in the first place?). So I think the simplest way to do it would be to add a "Auto-categorize by source" button that would use the existing category feature and just automatically create and assign categories based the source for each app. This would be a one-time operation so the user would need to click the button whenever they wanted this to be done again.

[DJCrashdummy]

Seems like a very niche use case (not sure what you mean by "i want to use/avoid particular app 'sources'" - wouldn't you avoid adding apps from those sources in the first place?).

well i'm not sure how niche the use case is resp. at least the feature would be... -> more on that in the next paragraph.
for sure if i want to use/avoid a particular "source" (aka. distributor) i choose/avoid it in the first place, but different "sources" (aka. distributors) do have different qualities resp. pros & cons and they change over time, not to mention my preferences... and then sorting out which app comes from which "source" (aka. distributor) is somewhat cumbersome.

another use case for such a feature:
power users know what to expect from different "sources" (aka. distributors)... e.g. if an apps "source" (aka. distributor) is F-Droid i know, i have to be a little bit more patient with receiving updates as it usually takes some days longer.
it may be nice for some user or another to have such information with the first glimpse and not have to fiddle quite some time around to get such hints.

---

yes, your suggestion of auto-generated categories seems to be a good way to go, with reasonable effort (i guess).
the one thing i'm not sure about is, to make it a manual one-time operation... as they might get messed up over time and forgotten about to "refresh" manually. 🤔
i would rather make them somewhat "special categories" which don't show up to allocate apps manually (and can't be renamed if the other categories become editable at some point) and update them periodically to be resp. stay correct. at least while checking for updates this could be done and even for a single app if something was changed.
-> then this feature would be just an additional slider "show categories based on source/distributor" at the settings with no additional hassle for the user.

[ImranR98]

update them periodically

That would defeat the purpose of using the existing categorization logic (simple to implement) but you're right, having a one-time operation that can lead to things going out of sync over time is not a good solution.

[DarkCrypt]

I do like the idea of being able to see the source name within the app list. The problem is how to implement this while trying to avoid clutter. Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time coming up with good ideas.

The suggested 3rd line sounds like the best option to me so far but a small issue with this would be with "F-Droid Official". The 3rd line would be a duplicate which would look silly unless this source is excluded from the implementation.

Also, I can understand some users will want to categorize by source but I like to categorize by what the app does (similar to how app stores do) instead. It's easy to do this manually when adding apps since Obtainium is a manual use app anyway.