F-Droid

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Posted on Aug 14, 2025 by Licaon_Kter

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 14 Aug 2025, Week 33

F-Droid core

After the last TWIF we pushed the latest version of F-Droid Client and Basic as suggested, so if the About screen does not say 1.23.1 you need to update now.

We’ve been continuing to look for fixes in the updates department and we focused on the issue brought up by AGP 8.12.0 last week. Apps that were not reproducible build are fixed in our build recipes for now, and for those that are reproducible build, we’ve worked with the app developers to temporarily downgrade AGP.

An issue was raised with Google here, but we’re not only waiting for that and will work to upgrade the “ware” as needed, as it will improve our processing speed as well. While “don’t fix it if it ain’t broke” helped us focus in other areas that needed our attention, and we have plenty of those, we’ve reached the limits of what software cycle optimizations can gain us. Our weekly 100-200 apps built fit the human and hardware sweet spot, yet any of the 4 or 5 heavy apps can push other smaller ones to skip a cycle, worse, if they happen to update at the same time and we’re not even talking about other “surprise” type problems like we had last month.

Community News

Unrelated to our struggles above, Dries Buytaert has a nice 20 minutes long post about “Funding Open Source like public infrastructure” which aligns with our goals and aspirations. Most users know F-Droid as the storeapp catalog, but when you install an app it’s because the web server, the storage server, the signing server, the build server, the mirrors, the signing code, the build code, the scanner code, the VM creator code, and more, all worked for you, and all are readily and transparently available as FLOSS just a git clone away.

Syncthing-Lite, Browse Syncthing shares, is a revival of the old Lite version that was no longer developed. This is the simpler app for quick shares, it does not have the powerful sync capabilities of the full app.

Taler Cashier was updated to 1.0.1, Taler Point-of-Sale Terminal to 1.0.3 and Taler Wallet to 1.0.8. Back in May, we missed the special milestone release of 1.0, as the software world appears to hold only a symbolic meaning to these numbers. The Taler team wrote about some big news for their ecosystem of apps, and about the future here.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon was updated to 3.2.0 with lots of improvements for thrown weapon, buffs, nerfs and more but also with some sad news for users still on Android 4 or older. You can read about these in the developer July 25 post and August 4 post.

WebLibre: Private Browser, Browse privately, search locally, organize tabs, block tracking and use Tor, is another Firefox fork? Yes and no. A browser written in Flutter (imagine that!) that uses Mozilla Gecko, the engine, just like Firefox and our very own Fennec do. It still has a lot to be improved for it to work out smoothly but it is worth a try. Don’t forget to offer feedback to the developer. I know I did. 😉

@kitswa puts down the virtual game pad to process some metrics:

My new F-Droid Metrics hosted panel offers some insights into F-Droid. The calculations are a bit iffy. (My calculations always are 😛) The data fetcher needs a bit of work too on the user-friendliness side. And I am unsure whether the data labels mean what I think they mean. (Is hit == download ?). Enjoy it while it works! I probably won’t maintain it long-term.

To avoid the current host analytics and to have this panel working well in to the future, one can read the instructions on how to self-host it. And we know that’s the best route, always!

@shuvashish76 has good, bad and mixed news:

After 2 years, 1 month, and 30 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 13 (code name “trixie”). You can peruse the news post or better yet, upgrade. F-Droid uses Debian internally and we are eager to upgrade as soon as possible too, as we’ve been testing locally already.

Wikipedia updated their app to r/2.7.50543-r-2025-07-31 but they lost a legal challenge to the new “Online Safety Act” rules, which it says could threaten the human rights and safety of its volunteer editors. You can read more about this here and hopefully the UK government will listen to the High Court’s judgment and protect Wikipedia contributors in the future.

Rethink: DNS + Firewall + VPN was updated to v0.5.5o after one year. Complete rewrite of the network engine ‘firestack’ for better stability and performance and with ABI builds available, package size reduced. Yet maybe you could postpone updating? The developer saw some issues, like this one and asked us to disable this version. It will take a future cycle to remove this version and update to the next one.

German tech blogger Kuketz had a recent guide on how to “Hack on Android: Manage Google services on VPN only” that used Rethink, but he got hit by the issues too. His new post explains what’s going on (🇩🇪).

Removed Apps

8 apps were removed per the developer’s request 😞
  • Audio Recorder: Record audio files
  • Binaural Beats: Meditation helper
  • Call Recorder: Simple call recorder, no ads, open-source
  • Darkness Immunity: Darkness Immunity Digital Amulet
  • Hourly Reminder: Remind you about hours passed
  • Media Merger: Merge media files, open-source
  • SMS Gate: Backup all your SMS to an IMAP server or a local folder
  • ToneGenerator.class: ToneGenerator class preview app, open-source

Newly Added Apps

12 more apps were newly added
  • AndroidMic: Use your device as a microphone for your PC
  • Artvee for Muzei: Highlighted Artworks by Artvee
  • Atalaya: Monitor and get information from nearby cell phone towers
  • CuteCalc: A cute an elegant calculator app
  • Flux: Minimalistic, Material UI, Productivity Application
  • Free the bugs: A small puzzle game where you fix simple code bugs
  • Hidroly: Track your water intake with ease
  • Neumorphic Calculator: A sleek, customizable calculator with a soft, modern, neumorphic-inspired design
  • NoWakeLock: Control wakelocks, alarms & services
  • QuickSE: Rooted users can view and change SELinux mode easily
  • Torrent Search: Search and download torrents from multiple sources
  • YA Habit Tracker: A Modern Habit Tracker

Updated Apps

160 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

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