The problem lies in the way hildon-application-manager (ham) interacts with APT. Instead of utilizing the apt-pkg library, the ham launches a subprocess (apt-worker) to communicate with APT. This subprocess has to parse the sources list, read the cache, and communicate with ham via the standard file descriptors (stdout, stdin, stderr). That's mostly done for security purposes I guess, to not have ham run as root. Fixing this does not look easy to me, and especially I would not consider Nokia to fix this for fremantle. It might require changes to the protocol used by apt-worker and could easily break things.