F-Droid's Progress and What's Coming in 2025

A decent bunch of the apps on F-Droid are woefully inadequate or still early in development. At the moment F-Droid allows sorting apps either by time of most recent update, or alphabetically. Neither of those is actually useful to me as user.

If there are multiple apps doing the same thing, it is currently incredibly hard to see which one is the best. I do not want to download and install multiple apps only to find out they are essentially unusable, and that of the 5 options only a single one is actually functional.

I understand that F-Droid might not want to go all-in with the rating and review system, but a barebones download counter would at least show some indication whether people install it once and remove it after trying it out, or leave it installed long enough to survive multiple updates.

Aah, wasn't aware this is possible now, thats cool.

But raises the question of how exactly to check and communicate to users what data are being collected.

With a PWA almost all of the code runs on the server. Even if that server is based on an open source project, there is no guarantee that there has been no modification (eg a plugin) that changes behavior.

Not sure there is a way to reconcile these demands in an automated way that doesnt ultimately fall back on trusting the developer.

I think I have maybe two apps installed via it currently. If something is available on the Google App Store I'm generally using that instead.

F-Droid Basic (by F-Droid developers) removes some features, but targets Android 14 instead (targetSdk 34): https://f-droid.org/packages/org.fdroid.basic/ ; my understanding is that it should be merged at some point, but isn't yet.

Note that targetSdk is different from minSdk: https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/manifest/uses-sdk...

F-Droid article on this: https://f-droid.org/2024/02/29/twif.html#f-droid-core

There could be some improvements on the process of adding an app though. I recently made a very small app for myself that I thought "maybe a couple of people would find this useful, I should add it to F-Droid".

I started by reading their docs on how to add a new app. I created an account on gitlab, forked their repo and added my app. Their pipeline failed without telling me why. After reading and re-reading everything a bunch of times I had to give up and look for help. The instructions said to fix all pipeline problems before creating a merge request.

So I go to the contact page where there are a bunch of options. I chose IRC and join. Ask for help. No answer or any message sent in the channel for the next 24 hours. At this point I am getting a bit irritated and are thinking about truly giving up. Then eventually someone answers in the channel and says "create a merge request and someone will help you". Which is what the docs said NOT to do. Fine. Ok. I will create it.

I go to Gitlab and chose the right template for the merge request. And now I get a whole bunch of new instructions and questions that I have to answer that the docs never mentioned. And it even mentions in that template that I should TRY to fix pipeline problems, or someone will help me (still going against official docs on their site). Since there was a bunch of questions I would have to look up to properly answer I did not have the time to do it right away... And I still have not done it. Its on a todo-list.

tl;dr: F-Droid works okey but the whole process of submitting a new app for someone that has not gone through it before could be made way better with some updated and unified instructions.

and I was wondering "which apps do you think are missing" ? (it can be games or even very specific needs)

as I think lot of people are like me here, we would like to hack on some "weekend project" but we lack creativity.

the tailscale client introduced a bug with a new updated that crashes on launch. the developers rolled back the release after a few days, by then i had already unknowingly installed it.

now came the world of hurt. while it is also partially the dev team's fault to not quickly patch a new version for f-droid to allow easy update, there was no way to rollback versions of installed apps from the store!

non-rooted phones have a lot of issues with installing specific apk version without getting rid of app data, and it really soured my experiences with using open-source app stores. in this case, the only way was to wait 4 months to finally get the official patch. i really wish they introduce a way to install older version without losing app data.

besides this, i do agree with others on having no filters to weed out dead projects from results. the sort by last update does most of the job to be fair.

iOS apps on f-droid, huh?