What is fastlane in gitlab 20.06.22

/                                           (repo-root)
└── fastlane
    └── metadata
        └── android
            ├── en-US                       (en-US seems to be required by F-Droid)
            │   ├── short_description.txt   (short description, max 80 chars) ¹
            │   ├── full_description.txt    (full app description) ¹
            │   ├── title.txt               (app name)
            │   ├── video.txt               (URL to a video introducing the app)
            │   ├── images
            │   │   ├── icon.png            (app icon; useful e.g. for "service apps" containing none)
            │   │   ├── featureGraphic.png  (promo banner, shown on top of the app desc in F-Droid client; landscape) ³
            │   │   ├── promoGraphic.png    (same, smallscreen size?)
            │   │   ├── tvBanner.png        (same, TV-screen size?)
            │   │   ├── phoneScreenshots    ²
            │   │   │   ├── 1.png
            │   │   │   ├── 2.png
            │   │   │   ...
            │   │   ├── sevenInchScreenshots/
            │   │   ├── tenInchScreenshots/
            │   │   ├── tvScreenshots/
            │   │   └── wearScreenshots/
            │   └── changelogs              ³
            │       ├── 100000.txt          (must correspond to versionCode, literally, no padding)
            │       ├── 100100.txt          (so this means: versionCode=100100)
            │       └── 100101.txt          (max size: 500 bytes)
            └── ru
                ...
                └── changelogs
                    └── 100100.txt

Your gains by using Fastlane:

you can maintain summary/description in your app's repo and will not need to open MRs each time you change them
you can provide screenshots which will be shown along with the description, raising the attention of potential users
you can even provide per-release changelogs, which will be shown inside the app's description, so your users don't have to "hunt them down"

TL;DR: while not mandatory, it's highly recommended for your F-Droid listings. Full Fastlane documentation can be found here. And if your project is hosted at Github, you can use this Github action to statically validate its Fastlane metadata (if you host it elsewhere: the author states it "just runs a Docker image with the compiled binary that one can run pretty much anywhere").

https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/1895688

Anonymous

What is fastlane in gitlab 20.06.22

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