No idea why, but I don't see their comments anywhere in this thread. Thanks for confirming.

EDIT:

I found this metadata file, is that the one?

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/blob/master/metadata/de.mm20.launcher2.release.yml

From the file:

MaintainerNotes: |- Kvaesitso uses several external APIs for search providers. Several of them require signing up to obtain a developer API key: gdrive search, openweathermap, HERE and Meteorologisk institutt. It's not possible for users to provide these keys as explained here: https://github.com/MM2-0/Kvaesitso/issues/227#issuecomment-1366826219 If keys are not provided, these features are automatically disabled during the build.

core/shared/build.gradle.kts and plugins/sdk/build.gradle.kts have configurations in them for publishing artifacts to maven repos. They are not used during the build, but detected by F-Droid scanner anyway. We patch it out from core/shared/build.gradle.kts, since this module itself is still used in compilation, and delete plugins/sdk/build.gradle.kts because it's not used in app compilation.

Kvaesitso depended on different libraries used for gdrive login in the past that pulled GMS dependency, however it's not the case anymore:

https://github.com/MM2-0/Kvaesitso/issues/583#issuecomment-1775268896 The new libraries pull OpenTelemetry though, but it's unclear if it's used (considering gdrive integration is disabled).

Max heap size is reduced in gradle.properties to avoid gradle daemon being killed by OOM manager.

Older versions of Kvaesitso had onedrive integration that depended on non-whitelisted maven repos, but it was removed.

Upstream provides an fdroid flavor, however there's no difference with default flavor except for different versionName.

For some reason, F-Droid fails to pick up the correct gradle version from distributionUrl if subdir is used.

It seems to be the case that F-Droid removes gdrive and onedrive in their build. Though, there seem to be no mentions of Wikipedia.