Back in September, we announced that the F-Droid ecosystem is moving fully to YAML formats. That means the old .txt custom metadata format as well as the JSON metadata format will be entirely removed from all the tools, like fdroidserver. The upcoming 2.0 release of fdroidserver will only...

Android device vendors are known for their short support periods. They only provide updates for a limited time or even ship devices with old Android versions. Developers then have to deal with a fragmented distribution of Android versions. Android 4.x is still used by around 2% of the active devices...

We have just completed a big overhaul of the website that makes it run smoother, handle translations better, and it much easier to build and customize. The whole process was updated to run in Debian/buster using only Debian packages, while keeping the standard Ruby methods working. That makes it easy...

We rarely hear from academics and researchers, but we know that F-Droid is important to their work because they cite F-Droid as a source in so many papers:

• arXiv lists more than 200 results
• Semantic Scholar lists more than 200 results
• Google Scholar lists more than...

I just gave a small talk about F-Droid at FSFE Berlin. For this I gathered some stats about what happened in our repo over the last year. I did a similar thing about 1.5 years ago, you can find the numbers on page 9 of the pdf.

Push messages are an essential part of connected mobile devices. They are also one of the critical missing pieces in the open source Android ecosystem. Until now, free Android apps would either need to implement their own push notification system, do without any push messaging or use the proprietary Google...

F-Droid is a free software community app store that has been working since 2010 to make all forms of tracking and advertising visible to users. It has become the trusted name for privacy in Android, and app developers who sell based on privacy make the extra effort to get their...

Some F-Droid contributors were at 36c3 this past December. Since it is a giant meeting place for so many related projects, we are including this small report of F-Droid activity there. We had developer meeting and a user meeting led by @Bubu. At the developer meeting, there was...