Since 2010, F-Droid has been the go-to place for downloading free and open source apps for Android. Its client app is the one people interact with the most, and it has received many upgrades over the years.
But now it’s time for a massive rewrite that has emerged from more than a year of development and numerous test releases.
A comprehensive redesign
Kotlin replaces the original Java codebase, and the interface has been rebuilt on Jetpack Compose. The result is an app that follows Material Design throughout, so that it looks and behaves like it belongs on a modern Android device.
The app’s bottom bar now has three sections: Discover for browsing, Search for queries and quick access to categories, and My Apps for tracking installed apps, updates, and issues.
You will also find that the Settings menu has moved to the top-right, being placed alongside the new Repositories menu.
Coming back to the Discover page, it has been configured to highlight newly added apps, recently updated ones, and the most downloaded ones in the repository. Related categories are grouped together, making it easier to browse the full catalog without getting lost in a long list.
Search now handles categories, app descriptions, and translated content in addition to app names, and results for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean queries have improved. Your search history is also saved for future queries.
Filtering has been reworked too; results can be narrowed by anti-features, device compatibility, and category all at once.
What else’s changed?
This is how the old F-Droid app looks in comparison.
The app now checks for updates in the background by default, removing the need for the pull-to-refresh gesture that used to trigger repository scans. Of course the manual check is still available from the My Apps page once you go into the three-dot menu.
Similarly, the app hiding feature for changing F-Droid’s logo to a calculator app has been moved into the Settings menu under “App Icon,” and the Nearby app sharing tool has been temporarily removed.
Concluding their announcement, F-Droid stated that:
F-Droid 2.0 represents a major milestone, but it is not the end of the story. Rebuilding the app has given us a stronger foundation, yet there is still plenty of work ahead.
As the rollout reaches more users, we expect to learn a great deal from real-world usage. Community feedback has shaped F-Droid 2.0 from its earliest design discussions through many alpha and RC releases, and it will continue to guide future improvements.
A looming threat
Last year in August, Google announced that starting 2027, every Android app developer would need to register with the company, providing government-issued ID, signing key evidence, and a fee.
This way, apps from unregistered developers would be blocked from running on certified Android devices.
Of course F-Droid didn’t sit by idly; one of their board members, Marc Prud’hommeaux, launched the Keep Android Open campaign in response, which has since brought together over 70 organizations from 20+ countries.
Its signatories include big names like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation, KDE, Proton, Codeberg, VideoLAN, LineageOS, CryptPad and the Tor Project.
Seeing that we are shy of the 90-day mark for this absurd lockdown to occur, F-Droid introducing such a major update only strengthens their stance of not backing down to Google’s strongarming tactics. Get F-Droid 2.0
This revamp is rolling out gradually over the coming weeks, so if you haven’t received this on your existing installation, just wait. For new installations, it is a similar situation, as the latest stable release is still v1.23.2.
On the other hand, if you can’t be bothered with practicing the virtue of patience, then you could download the latest 2.0 beta build from the packages portal.
I hate to say it… I tried F-droid, but I simply found no apps I wanted were in it :(
The opposite for me. I find so many good apps there that I’m scared of my storage space. Wether it’s a pdf reader, scanner, a file manager or a antennapod, youtube clients(pipepipe), it has all of it.
A lot of my favorite apps are there.
Material Files, Librera reader, KeepassDX, Syncthing, AntennaPod, Seal, Echo, and a bunch of open source games like Unciv, Xeonjia and Shattered Pixel Dungeon, or Idle Fantasy if you like idle games.
If you are into self hosting (I am) they have multiple Jellyfin clients, Immich client, etc.
There’s also Lemmy clients.
And Termux if you are comfortable with tinkering in the terminal. I use it to run a privoxy and ssh server from my phone that I can connect to from my work computer. It helps me get past some firewalls.
You might want to add extra repositories like IzzyOnDroid or Guardian Project
You have to add more repositories on it like izzyondroid, guardian project, calyx institute etc. (Im just listing what i have rn but likely there are more)
Yeah… I wasn’t aware of that. I think I tried apps like Control4 and Sonos and couldn’t find them, and then bailed (this was a few days ago).
The apps I saw when opening it, just (at least at first glance), didn’t really feel like top tier apps, but I might try it again, as I didn’t know you could add more repos
What I’m really hoping is that Steam opens a Android App store
Control4 and Sonos
You won’t find many apps that depend on third party closed source services. At least not in the official repos (there might be a few, but marked as having “anti-features”).
But imho, that is a good thing… I go to f-droid to find fully free and open source apps, for more corporate stuff you still can use the official store.
(Rant: I wish all these smart home companies fully embraced open standards like Matter… it’s annoying having to install a different proprietary app for every different brand of smart home device… F-Droid does have a Home Assistant client compatible with open standards, but it won’t work properly with locked-in proprietary systems)
i use great apps from there as a replacement for most things on my phone and they are just better in every way.
thing is, discoverability on fdroid is terrible. you kinda have to look it.
Try Cfait ;) (CalDAV / local task manager with VJOURNAL support)
Does anyone have a solid opinion on this? I’ve been using droid-ify for a while now and am considering switching back over. Thoughts?
well they should’ve written “Beta” in the title, as it hasn’t been released yet.
Ah! Well, fudgeeeeeee
Its a complete UI rewrite. It signals that F-Droid: the repositories, the philosophy of open source app distribution and the titular app are here to stay and will continue to exist in these trying times of google and android enshittification.
When its released for everyone, afaik this month, you should try it and see how you like it. I’ve never tried droid-ify, but im positive F-Droid 2 will be an improvement over version 1.
If you try F-Droid Basic (their more lightweight version that doesn’t do the remote sharing thing) you can see it already, the redesign has been available there for a while.
But I have to say I preferred being able to filter by just the whole wide category and sort it by new, instead of having to pick now a subcategory… specially for things that I don’t mind so much what’s the sub-genre, when I just want to browse, not nit-pick amongst a lot of specific subcategories.
It’s going to become more popular as Google forces people to de-google just to get apps from f-droid
I feel like that headline is a little bit of unfortunate phrasing for an article about a massive leap forward.
Yea I understood it as they are stuck
