F-Droid’s Android open-source app store has been rebuilt from the ground up
“Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app store has gone 10 years without a major update. That’s finally changing: After a multiyear effort, the team has just announced F-Droid 2.0 is rolling out. The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there’s optional support for Android’s Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus.”
I've been using F-Droid, along with Obtainium, for a long time. Many open-source apps are not at all on the official Android play store.
F-Droid fetches the public git/mercurial source code for an app, strips out non-free dependencies (like proprietary tracking, ads, or Google Play Services binaries), and compiles the APK on its build servers. Because F-Droid compiles the binaries itself, the resulting APKs are typically signed with F-Droid's cryptographic key rather than the app developer's key.
But this does guarantee that the app you download and install, is true to the published source code. Nothing of course is perfect, but we have seen numerous times that problematic apps have even appeared on both the Android and Apple play stores. So let no-one cast stones from their glass houses.
The reason I have returned twice to Android, is because of the freedoms of being able to install open source software without limitations. It bugs me that both Apple and Google go out of their way to control and monetise apps for the platforms. Imagine if Linux imposed such restrictions? Basically everything installed on Linux is “sideloaded” and guess what, my Linux has been working fine for decades (Better than my wife's Windows has been struggling along).
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/f-droid-gets-its-biggest-update-in-a-decade-with-new-ui-and-smoother-app-installs" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">http://see
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/f-droid-gets-its-biggest-update-in-a-decade-with-new-ui-and-smoother-app-installs#technology #opensource #fdroid
