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Comment by lucgommans | Hacker News Reader

The same advantage as having 30 updaters run in the background versus running

    apt update

Imagine every app you install, from your calculator to your chat applications, has to have its own updater. That's why I like F-Droid rather than downloading the Signal APK directly. Already have to do this for Threema unfortunately, as they're neither on F-Droid nor freely available on the Play store.

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To help clarify to GP (was going to help reply then saw yours) F-Droid is both the name of the core website hosting the APK repos and build infra, and the name of the Android client which can connect to any F-Droid compatible repo - there are a bunch of projects who host their APKs in their own F-Droid repo, all you have to do is go to their website and scan the QR code to add it or enter manually.

Signal could run their own F-Droid repo and people just add to their F-Droid client without using or touching the F-Droid website or build infrastructure at all, which would allow folks to do as lucgommans explains - one phone client connected to many repos, no manual downloading.

Example: https://www.bromite.org/fdroid

I hadn't even thought of this, that's a good point and (afaik) negates the entire excuse of Signal's not to be on F-Droid.

I think Signal's direct-download APK version (i.e., from signal.org, not from an app store) automatically prompts for updates (can someone verify?).

It does, but that's my point: it ships with its own updater rather than leaving me to just manage updates with a proper repository client (like apt, dnf, f-droid, google store, whatever).

Correct. I use it on LineageOS

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