A faster heart for F-Droid
f-droid.org
f-droid.org
- you can be your own F-Droid server
In fact it's a basic static HTTP(S) server that is generated with the list of .apk and meta-data so it rely doesn't require much.
I think what is concerning to people is that the most popular INSTANCE of F-Droid, the one that is by default when one downloads the F-Droid CLIENT, is "centralized" but again that's a misconception. It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself. Adding another repository in the F-Droid parlance is just a simple option of changing or adding a URL to more instances.
That being said if anybody here would like to volunteer to be provider a fallback to the build system to that popular instance, I imagine the F-Droid team would welcome that with open arms.
I've used F-Droid for years and I've never used the client ("the F-Droid app")
For me the value of F-Droid is as a list of open-source software with (a) pointers to source code and (b) sample binaries
The goal of F-Droid could be to enable Android users to read, edit and compile the software they choose to run on their "phones"
But F-Droid promotes their own app ("the client") so maybe the project's goal is something more like an "app store"
The goal that you suggest is interesting. It reminds me of Guix, where one can obtain binaries or one can build the entirety of packages oneself. All from the same system.
Perhaps you could share how you are currently building software from source and/or F-Droid?
Is popularity, e.g., user majorities versus user minorities, always equivalent to "importance". For web traffic and associated data collection, ad services, etc., popularity is obviously important. But what if one is not focused on such things
Consider the statement "It's only popular, it's not really central for F-Droid itself"
Some people might use "F-Droid" in the same sense as the main page [1] does, to mean "an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications" but others in the sense the about page [2] uses it, referring to the "non-profit volunteer project", which is consistent with the project statues [3]:
> F-Droid is the name of a not-for-profit technical, scientific and creative community effort serving the public benefit.
The documentation start page [4] makes it a bit more clear:
> F-Droid is both a repository of verified free software Android apps as well as a whole “app store kit”, providing all the tools needed to setup and run an app store. It is a community-run free software project developed by a wide range of contributors. It also includes complete build and release tools for managing the process of turning app source code into published builds.
[2] https://f-droid.org/en/about/
I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argument arose.
I know self-hosting is held as a point of pride by many, but in my experience you’re still better off putting lower cost hardware in a cheap colo with the contract going to the business entity which has defined ownership and procedures. Sending it over to a single member to put somewhere puts a lot of control into that one person’s domain.
I hope for the best for this team and I’m leaning toward believing that this person really is trusted and capable, but I would strongly recommend against these arrangements in any form in general.
EDIT: F-Droid received a $400,000 grant from a single source this year ( https://f-droid.org/2025/02/05/f-droid-awarded-otf-grant.htm... ) so now I’m even more confused about how they decided to hand this server to a single team member to host in unspoken conditions instead of paying basic colocation expenses.
That said, I still think that hosting a server in a member's house is a terrible decision for a project.
True, which is why I said the important parts need to be held by the legal entity representing the organization. If one person tries to hold it hostage, it becomes a matter of demonstrating that person doesn’t legally have access any more.
I’ve also seen projects fall apart because they forgot to transfer some key element into the legal entity. A common one is the domain name, which might have been registered by one person and then just never transferred over. Nobody notices until that person has a falling out and starts holding the domain name hostage.
At least they know where it is. They can go knock on the door.
Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.
Regardless, the ongoing interest on $400K alone would be enough to pay colo fees.
I don't know what kind of rates are available to non-profits, but with 400k in hand you can find nicer rates than 3.3 (as of today, at least).
that covers quite a few colo possibilities.
Another thing overlooked in this debate: Data center costs normally increase at the rate of inflation. This is not included in most estimates. That said, I still agree with the broad sentiment here: 400K USD is plenty of money to run a colo server for 10+ years from the risk-free interest rate.
I don’t know where you’re pricing coloration, but I could host a single server indefinitely from the interest alone on $400K at the (very nice) data centers I’ve used.
Collocation is not that expensive. I’m not understanding how you think $400K would disappear “fast” unless you think it’s thousands of dollars per month?
Of course you have to buy the switches and servers…
At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.
I really don’t know where the commenter above was getting the idea that $400K wouldn’t last very long
The jury's still out on whether or not this is a good thing.
So glad it grew into what it is now!
I Googled for that brand and got a few hits:
- https://inflect.com/building/1325-tracy-avenue-kansas-city/joes-datacenter/datacenter/joes-datacenter
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/joesdatacenter/
- https://www.facebook.com/joesdatacenter/
Another under appreciated point about that data center: It has excellent geographical location to cover North America.
Modern computers are super efficient. A 9755 has 128 cores and you can get it for cheap. If you've been doing this for a while you'd have gotten the RAM for cheap too.
If I, a normie, can have terabytes of RAM and hundreds of cores in a colo, I'm pretty sure they can unless they have some specific requests.
And dude, I'm in the Bay Area. Think about that. I'm in one of the highest cost localities and I can do this. I bet there are Colorado or Washington DCs that are even cheaper.
In any event if I was the volunteer sysadmin that had to babysit the box, I would rather have it at my home with business fiber where I am on premises most of the time because getting in and out of a colo is always a whole thing if their security is worth a damn.
Even given a frugal and accessible setup like that I can imagine 400k lasting 5 years tops especially if paying for the volunteers business fiber and much more especially given I expect some of it is to provide a sustainable compensation to key team members as well. Every cent will count.
IDK if they could bag this kind of grant every year, but isn't this the scale where cloud hosting starts to make sense?
Basically anywhere with cage or cabinet colocation is going to have site access, because those delineations only make sense to restrict on-site human access.
A lot of these places are like fortresses
Cloud hosting only makes sense at a very, very small scale, or absurdly large ones.
It has hosted quite a few famous services.
I doubt OSU is going to host F-Droid. It doesn't even sound like F-Droid would want them to host it.
It's a critical load-bearing component of FOSS on Android.
Or does it also serve the APKs?
Not clear if "contributor" is a person or an entity. The "hosting services" part make it sound more like a company rather than a natural person.
If they really want to run it out of a computer in their living room they should at least keep a couple servers on standby at different locations. Trusting a single person to manage the whole thing is fragile, but trusting a few people with boxes that are kept up to date seems pretty safe. What are the odds they'd all die together? Paying a colo or cloud provider is probably better if you care about more 9s of uptime, but do they really need it?
Unless you have even the faintest idea about how F-Droid does it, please stop spreading FUD. All the article says is that it is not a normal contract but a special arrangement where one or a select few have physical access. It could be in a locked basement, it could be in a sealed off cage in a data center, it could be a private research area at a university. We don't know.
A special arrangement with an academic institution providing data center services wouldn't be at all surprising, that has been the case for many large open source projects since long before the term was invented, including Linux, Debian and GNU itself.
Many of these are run by professionals with high standards. The Debian project has done pioneering work with reproducible builds, for example, something the F-Droid project is also very much involved with. Those things are what creates trust in the project.
They would have said this if it were the case. Why would they make it sound so sketchy if it wasn't otherwise? There is no "FUD", you don't know better than anyone else would either, so you don't get to make that argument and then speculate yourself.
Yes, and that is exactly the problem. They didn't write "a large university/company/government institute which wishes to remains anonymous has graciously donated space in their ISOwhatever certified in-house hosting facility", they wrote "physically held by a long time contributor".
It is written as if it is just Some Guy's Mom's Basement, with a guarantee of Trust Me Bro. If it is indeed hosted in a professional environment, why don't they say so?
People are assuming the worst because it isn't their first rodeo, and they've seen it go wrong time and time again. If F-Droid wants to be taken seriously Just Trust Us isn't good enough - especially with their main selling point being "you can't trust Google"!
What is usually more critical is who has the credentials for the domain management.
There is zero reason that server in the basement can't be a mirrored node to one or more vps'.
To extend your point, it's probably far better to have something cloud agnostic so it can flip between horribly compromised or attacked hosts.
Basement servers on Fibre, with a bit of knowledge and power backup can be just as reliable as most for one simple and over looked reason, they're reasonably obscure and don't fall under the attention large hosts receive. They absolutely have other issues to get rid of, which can be.
Self-hosting isn't about a "point of pride". Time reveals the value of self-sufficiency, not in every case to the absolute, but being able to.
Self-hosting at home is often similar skills to hosting a server in a datacenter, whether it's your own hardware co-located, rented server, or a managed server.
All the hand waving and excuses around global supply chains, quotes, etc...it took pretty long for them to acquire commodity hardware and shove it in a special someone's basement and they're trying to make it seem like a good thing?
F-Droid is often discussed in the GrapheneOS community, the concerns around centralization and signing are valid.
I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look.
The internet is run on binaries compiled in servers in random basements and you should be thankful for those basements because the corpos are never going to actually help fund any of it.
I would agree, that it is not a good look for this society, to lament so much about the big evil corporations and invest so little in the free alternatives.
Having two servers in two basements not near each other would be good, having five would be better, and honestly paying money to put them in colo facilities to have more reliable power, cooling, etc. would be better still. Computer hardware is very cheap today and it doesn't cost that much money to get a substantial amount of redundancy, without being dependent on any single big company.
They can then probably whip up a new hosted server to take over within a few days, at most. Big deal.
They are not hosting a critical service, and running on donations. They are doing everything right.
I bet the server should be quite powerful, with tons of CPU, RAM and SSD/NVMe to allow for fast builds. Memory of all kinds was getting more and more expensive this year, so the prolonged sourcing is understandable.
The trusted contributor, as the text says, is considered more trustworthy than an average colocation company. Maybe they have an adequate "basement", e.g. run their own colo company, or something.
It would be great to have a spare server, but likely it's not that simple, including the organization and the trust. A build server would be a very juicy attack target to clandestinely implant spyware.
As long as you don't need RAM or hard drives. It's getting more expensive all the time too. This isn't the ideal moment to replace a laptop let alone a server.
They didn't say what conditions it's held in. You're just adding FUD, please stop. It could be under the bed, it could be in a professional server room of the company ran by the mentioned contributor.
> Also 4th amendment protections so no one gets access without me knowing about it
laughs in FISA
If there's ever a need for a warrant for any of the projects, the warrant would likely involve seizure of every computer and data storage device in the home. Without a 3rd party handling billing and resource allocation they can't tell which specific device contains the relevant data, so everything goes.
So having something hosted at home comes with downsides, too. Especially if you don't control all of the data that goes into the servers on your property.
It’s not going to even remotely rival a tier 3/4 data center in any way.
The physical security, infrastructure, and connectivity will never come close. E.g. nobody is doing full 2N electrical and environmental in their homelab. And they certainly aren’t building attack resistant perimeter fences and gates around their homes, unless they’re home labbing on a compound in a war torn country.
Why would you need all of that if what they have works? Nobody is going to raid a repo of open source software, you can just download everything for free.
But the assertion by commenters above that home-hosting is a viable or even a better option for a project like this is silly. Colocating a single server is cheaper than a single a Comcast Business internet connection. Air conditioners fail. Electrical failures happen. These things might not be a problem for a personal project, but they're easily and cheaply mitigable risks at commercial scale.
Hahaha
at best you're getting a warrant. Slightly better you're getting a warrant _and_ a gag order. Then it escalates, and having your door kicked in at 6AM is about the best you can hope for.
But sure, you'll know about it. Most likely. Maybe.
Just don't keep anything important in there eh ?
(Note, this definitely applies to colocations too. It's just maybe a tiny bit harder to find which rack is yours, and companies of that size generally have lawyers to prevent that from happening. I'll take my chance with the hosting company.)
The alternative is to make big changes to your build system and packaging to compile N different versions of the executable/library. There's no easy way to just add a compiler flag that means "use AXV512 and generate SSE2 fallbacks where necessary".
The people that want to keep running new third-party binaries on 12+ year old CPUs might want to work with the compiler teams to make it feasible for those third parties to automatically generate the necessary fallback code paths. Otherwise, there will just be more and more instances of companies like Google deciding to start using the hardware features they've been deploying for 15+ years.
But you already know all that, since we discussed it four months ago. So why are you pretending like what you're asking for is easy when you know the tools that exist today aren't up to the task?
I finally just upgraded my 9 year old computer with an i5-6600k to a Ryzen 9 5950x because I wanted to be able to edit home videos. I already rarely even used 1 core on the old CPU, the new one is 7x more powerful, and it's an ebay part from 5 years ago. I don't foresee needing to upgrade again for another decade. I probably would've been good for another 15-20 years if I had upgraded to a DDR5 platform, but RAM prices had already spiked, so I just swapped the motherboard and CPU.
Also, even 12-year-old hardware is wicked fast.
With f-droid their main strength has always been replicable builds. We ideally just need to start hosting a second f-droid server somewhere else and then compare the results.
Some of their points are valid but way too often they're unable to accept that different services aren't always trying to solve the same problem.
100%. But you know, sadly I've noticed that non-experts are impressed by elitism. So you don't have to be good, you just have to shit on others, and passerbys will interpret that as being very competent.
Which is super ironic, from a project which about privacy but only supports hardware built by the biggest surveillance company.
Apart from the "someone's basement", as objected to in this thread, it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason.
This seems entirely like wishful thinking. They were using a 12 year old server that was increasingly unfit for the day-to-day task of building Android applications. It doesn't seem like they were in a position to acquire and deploy any exotic hardware (except to the extent that really old hardware can be considered exotic and no longer a commodity). I'd be surprised if the new server is anything other than off the shelf x86 hardware, and if we're lucky then maybe they know how to do something useful with a TPM or other hardware root of trust to secure the OS they're running on this server and protect the keys they're signing builds with.
> this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services.
So you are assuming it's a rando's basement when they never said anything like that.
If their way of doing business is so offensive either don't use them, disrupt them or pitch in and help.
> I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look.
What does make a "good look" for a volunteer project?
It's an open-source project. It should be... open. Not mysterious or secretive about overdue replacements of critical infrastructure.
This is effectively a rando's basement. It doesn't matter that they've been a contributor or whatever. Individuals change, relationships sour. Securely hosting how ? By locking the front door ? By being a random tech company in the midwest ? Or by having proper access control ?
As a little reminder, F-Droid has _all_ the signing keys on its build server. Compromising that is somewhere between "oh that's awful" and "stop the world". These builds go out as automatic updates too. So uh, yeah, I'd like it if it was hosted by someone serious and not my buddy joe who's a sysadmin don't worry
And maybe that is F-Droid's point: Security through obscurity. If the build infrastructure with the signing keys is unknown, then it's that much harder for Bad Actor to do things like backdoor E2E encrypted communication apps. This is, of course, the weakness in E2E encryption in apps obtained from mainstream/commercial app stores. For all we know, these may already be backdoored depending on where it came from.
However, the obscurity makes F-Droid hard to trust as an outsider to the project.
Clearly the GrapheneOS community is clueless then.
You can host F-Droid yourself, which is the opposite of centralized. If the GrapheneOS community actually is concerned about centralization they can host an instance as well.
Futhermore, each author signs their own software, which again is the opposite of centralized. One authority signing everything would be centralized.
So F-Droid is decentralized in authorship and distribution. Google store is only decentralized in authorship.
“F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access.”
Not reassuring.
A picture of the "living conditions" for the server would go a long way.
The set of people who can maliciously modify it is the people who run f-droid, instead of the cloud provider and the people who run f-droid.
It'd be nice if we didn't have to trust the people who run f-droid, but given we do I see an argument that it's better for them to run the hardware so we only have to trust them and not someone else as well.
You still have to trust the app store to some extent. On first use, you're trusting f-droid to give you the copy of the app with appropriate signatures. Running in someone else's data-center still means you need to trust that data-center plus the people setting up the app store, instead of just the app store. It's just a breach of trust is less consequential since the attacker needs to catch the first install (of apps that even use that technology).
The F-droid app itself can then verify signatures from both third party developers and first party builds on an f-droid machine.
For all its faults (of which there are many) it is still a leaps and bounds better trust story than say Google Play. Developers can only publish code, and optional signatures, but not binaries.
Combine that with distributed reproducible builds with signed evidence validated by the app and you end up not having to trust anything but the f-droid app itself on your device.
Yes, theoretically you can personally rebuild every package and check hashes or whatever, but that's preventative steps that no reasonable threat model assumes you are doing.
I've been using Obtainium more recently, and the idea is simple: a friendly UI that pulls packages directly from the original source. If I already trust the authors with the source code, then I'm inclined to trust them to provide safe binaries for me to use. Involving a middleman is just asking for trouble.
App stores should only be distributors of binaries uploaded and signed by the original authors. When they're also maintainers, it not only significantly increases their operational burden, but requires an additional layer of trust from users.
State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment.
Criminal/3rd party state intelligence service? Could get into both, at a risk or with blackmail, threats, or violence.
Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage.
I don’t think a state actor would actually break in to either in this case, but if they did then breaking into the private apartment would be a dream come true. Breaking into a data center requires coordination and ensuring a lot of people with access and visibility stay quiet. Breaking into someone’s apartment means waiting until they’re away from the premises for a while and then going in.
Getting a warrant for a private residence also would likely give them access to all electronic devices there as no 3rd party is keeping billing records of which hardware is used for the service.
> Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage.
Data centers are built with redundant network connectivity, backup power, and fire suppression. Accidents can happen at both, but that’s not the question. The question is their relative frequency, which is where the data center is far superior.
as a year long f-droid user I can't complain
Well, I remember one incident were a 'professional' data center burned down including the backups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OVHcloud#Incidents
I know no such incident for some basement hosting.
Doesn't mean much. I'm just a bit surprised so many people are worried because of the server location and no one had mentioned yet the quite outstanding OVH incident.
https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/wvqxs7/my_homelab_...
I don't have a bone to pick here. If F-Droid wants to free-ball it I think that's fine. You can usually run things for max cheap by just sticking them on a residential Google Fiber line in one of the cheap power states and then just making sure your software can quickly be deployed elsewhere in times of outage. It's not a huge deal unless you need always-on.
But the arguments being made here are not correct.
Or just a warrant and a phone call to set up remote access? In the UK under RIPA you might not even need a warrant. In USA you can probably bribe someone to get a National Security Letter issued.
Depending on the sympathies of the hosting company's management you might be able to get access with promises.
I dare say F-Droid trust their friends/colleagues more than they trust randos at a hosting company.
As an F-Droid user, I think I might too? It's a tough call.
Read Jabber.ru Hetzner accident: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
I had passively assumed something like this would be a Cloud VM + DB + buckets. The "hardware upgrade" they are talking about would have been a couple clicks to change the VM type, a total nothingburger. Now I can only imagine a janky setup in some random (to me) guy's closet.
In any case, I'm more curious to know exactly what kind hardware is required for F-Droid, they didn't mention any specifics about CPU, Memory, Storage etc.
> not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff
I took this to mean it's not in a colo facility either, assumed it mean't someone's home, AKA residential power and internet.
I agree that "behind someone's TV" would be a terrible idea.
If this is the hidden master server that only the mirrors talk to, then it's redundancy is largely irrelevant. Yes, if it's down, new packages can't be uploaded, but that doesn't affect downloads at all. We also know nothing about the backup setup they have.
A lot depends on the threat model they're operating under. If state-level actors and supply chain attacks are the primary threats, they may be better off having their system under the control of a few trusted contributors versus a large corporation that they have little to no influence over.
The build server going down means that no one's app can be updated, even for critical security updates.
For something that important, they should aspire to 99.999% ("five nines of") reliability. With a single physical server, achieving five nines over a long period of time usually means that you were both lucky (no hardware failures other than redundant storage) and probably irresponsible (applied kernel updates infrequently - even if only on the hypervisor level).
Now... 2 servers in 2 different basements? That could achieve five nines ;)
Wait until you find out how every major Linux distributions and software that powers the internet is maintained. It is all a wildly under-funded shit show, and yet we do it anyway because letting the corpos run it all is even worse.
e.g. AS41231 has upstreams with Cogent, HE, Lumen, etc... they're definitely not running a shoestring operation in a basement. https://bgp.tools/as/41231
Some distros do build on a centralized machine, but almost always one many maintainers have access to from their workstations, so once again any single compromised home computer backdoors everything.
The trust model of the linux distros that power most servers on the internet is totally yolo, without the funding to even approach doing build and release right, let alone code review. One compromised maintainer workstation burns it all to the ground.
Sorry if this ruins anyones rosy worldview. The internet is fragile as hell, and one bored teen away from another slammer-worm style meltdown.
Relevant context: I founded stagex exactly because no previous Linux distribution has a decentralized trust story appropriate for production use hosting public internet services.
Once you decentralize supply chain trust then the question of "which place and people people do we trust for the one holy server" totally goes away.
Fixing this requires universal reproducible builds redundantly built and signed by independently controlled hardware. Once you have that then you no longer have single points of failure so centralized high security colo cost becomes a moot issue.
Maybe the person who wrote that is only familiar with web hosting services or colo-by-the-rack-unit type services where remote-hands services are more commonly relied on. But they don't need to use these services. They can easily get a locked cabinet (or even just a 1/4 cabinet) only they could access.
You want to host servers on your own hardare? Uh yikes. Let's unpack this. As a certified AWS Kubernetes professional time & money waster, I can say with authority that this goes against professional standards (?) and is therefore not a good look. Furthermore, I can confirm that this isn't it chief.
And you're not going to even get close to the cabinet in a data center with a set of bolt cutters. But even if you did, you brought the wrong tool, because they're not padlocked.
Otoh, maybe you've got a cabinet in a DC with very secure locks from europe.... But all are keyed alike. Whoops.
A drill would be easier to bring in (especially if it just looks like a power screwdriver) and probably get in faster though. Drill around the locks/hinges until the door wiggles off.
People used to criticize the walled gardens for having capricious reviewers and slow review times, but I found F-Droid much more frustrating to get approval from and much slower to get a release out.
So this development is much appreciated. In fact I had an inkling that build times had improved recently when an update made it out to F-Droid in only a day or two.
Countries which fear they could be cut off from the duopoly mobile ecosystem should be forcing android manufacturers to bundle in F-Droid; For the amount of nonsense regulations they force phone manufacturers to adhere to, bundling F-Droid wouldn't be that hard.
Google won't be happy, but anti-trust regulations would take care of it.
(I've worked with several politicians. You'd be surprised what a well timed letter or meeting can achieve.)
I wrote a few times to my local MPs ("député", as we call them in France). I usually got a response, though I suspect it was written by their secretary with no other consequence. In one case (related to privacy against surveillance), they raised a question in the congress, which had just a symbolic impact.
It may be different in other countries. In France, Parliament is de-facto a marginal power against a strong executive power. Even the legal terms are symptomatic of this situation: the government submits a "project of law" while MPs submit a "proposal of law" (which, for members of the governing party, is almost always written by the government then endorsed by some loyal MP).
A project like F-Droid is dumb to begin with where they're the one to build the apps.
I heartily disagree. Linux distributions also build the packages themselves, and that adds a layer of trust.
It ensures that everything in the fdroid repo is free software, and can be self-built.
There are other ways to ensure something is free software and can be self built. Their approach is highly inefficient.
And that being a libre package from F-Droid. And I noticed several other bugs. Tyr for instance (an Yggmail service which bundles Yggdrasil) doesn't have an armv7a version. Tyr could be really useful with DeltaChat because you could talk with any relative without depending on 3rd party mail services. And because of arbitrary limitations, compiling a 32 bit binary it's damn difficult for maintainers, yet I could compile yggmail for Go under Termux without no issues.
Thus, that's why I prefer PostMarketOS, software would just run once it's installed and for sure I wouldn't need to set an SDK weighting several GB's.
This just reads to me like they have racked a box in a colo with a known person running the shared rack rather than someone’s basement but who really knows they aren't exactly handing out details.
This is ambiguous, it could mean either a contributor's rack in a colocation centre or their home lab in their basement. I'd like to think they meant the former, but I can't deny I understood the latter in my first read.
Also, no details on the hardware?
I'm curious why supply chain issues got in the way and why they couldn't just configure a Dell Poweredge and get delivery in a couple weeks.
I'm assuming they have some special requirements that weren't met by an off-the-shelf server, so I'm just curious what those requirements are.
> The previous server was 12 year old hardware
which is pretty mad. You can buy a second hand system with tons of ram and a 16-core Ryzen for like $400. 12-year old hardware is only marginally faster than a RPi 5.
Building a budget AM4 system for roughly $500 would be within the realm of reason. ($150 mobo, $100 cpu, $150 RAM, that leaves $100 for storage, still likely need power and case.)
https://www.amazon.com/Timetec-Premium-PC4-19200-Unbuffered-...
https://www.amazon.com/MSI-MAG-B550-TOMAHAWK-Motherboard/dp/...
For a server that's replacing a 12 year old system, you don't need DDR5 and other bleeding edge hardware.
(I might be spoiled by sane reproducible build systems. Maybe F-droid isn't.)
A Dell R620 is over 12 years old and WAY faster than a RPi 5 though...
Sure, it'll be way less power efficient, but I'd definitely trust it to serve more concurrent users than a RPi.
My 14yo laptop-used-as-server disagrees. Also keep in mind that CPU speeds barely improved between about 2012 and 2017, and 2025 is again a lull https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html
I'm also factoring in the ability to use battery bypass in phones I buy now because they are so powerful, I might want to use them as free noiseless server in the future. You can do a heck of a lot on phone hardware nowadays, paying next to nothing for power and no additional cost on your existing internet connection. A RPi 5 is that same ballpark
Saying this on HN, of course.
How many things went upside down and all the "right" things were done (corporate governance, cloud native deployment, automation, etc.). The truth is none of these processes are actually going to make things more secure, and many projects went belly up despite following these kinds of recommendations.
That being said, I am grateful to F-Droid fighting the good fight. They are providing an invaluable service and I, for one, am even more grateful that they are doing it as uncompromisingly as possible (well into discomfort) according to their principles.
Not to mention it also simplifies the security of controlling signing keys significantly.
Brought to you by the helpful folks who managed to bully WinAmp into retreating from open source. Very productive.
It showed up one day while I searched about why F-Droid was always so extremely slow to update and download... then trying Droid-ify, that was never a problem any more, it clearly had much better connectivity (or simply less users?)
assumptions
>I could source apks elsewhere
Do you or do you not have apps you want to install?
Critical for serving malware and spyware to the masses, yes. GrapheneOS is based on Android and is far better than a Googled Android variant precisely because it is free of Google junk and OEM crapware.
I wonder how many of HN audience does know someone, or a guy who knows a guy, which works in a data center able to manage the hardware and a simple email/message/hello there could open a new opportunity.
> The previous server was 12 year old hardware and had been running for about five years. In infrastructure terms, that is a lifetime. It served F-Droid well, but it was reaching the point where speed and maintenance overhead were becoming a daily burden.
lol. if they're gonna use gitlab just use a proper setup - bigco is already in the critical path...