F-Droid

Single Point Of Slowness

Posted on Aug 28, 2025 by paulali

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 28 Aug 2025, Week 35

F-Droid core

F-Droid’s push for decentralization means not only having multiple repos, but also clients and mirrors. Since 2017 the Client has been able to use mirrors and share the load between mirrors and main server so none could ever become a SPOF (Single Point of Failure), or in our recent case a point of slowness. Basically, each new app download will be tried from another mirror, and more importantly by canceling and retrying, you can force it to use some other with, hopefully, a better throughput.

F-Droid Client and Basic have this feature on by default, but unfortunately other clients do not support mirrors, or they need to be manually enabled. We know that Neo Store, recently updated to 1.1.1, has mirror support but you need to go to Settings, Repos, F-Droid and check “Mirror rotation”. If you use some other client, do reach out to the developer to add mirror support (ask about index-v2 too while you’re there) and maybe you can use one of the clients that have mirror support today until they figure it out.

Why talk about mirrors now? These past days users complained about downloads being slow, and when we looked at our servers (remember, mirrors are graciously hosted by organizations around the world that care about FLOSS and our mission, but we don’t have visibility into their servers) the load was seemingly double, and constant, out of the blue. If this was related to some other recent news in the Android world, we don’t know, but its timing was amusing at least.

Community News

Back in May we reported that the Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab was in danger of shutting down. Looks like we missed the good news that thanks to the amazing community support, the team is funded for the next year. Read more about what the future holds here.

Fennec F-Droid was updated to 142.0.0 and got a lot of publicity, and not for how great it works, unfortunately. It appears the slow spell hit it too as there’s an issue using extensions that use webRequest listeners, like uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, Ghostery, TamperMonkey and more, that delay the connections to websites on start. For now we recommend to try a couple of things. While disabling these extensions fixes it, we know that the Internet is unusable without ad blocking.

First trick is to disable the extension, wait, hear me out, just toggle it OFF then ON back again. (Small note here: while there are many ads related extensions out there, maybe it’s time to look at their usage a bit more and decide to keep only one. We’ve seen users installing them all thinking this will cover all angles, while the truth is they are messing with each others rules and you might end up more exposed than less.)

Second, the issue is seen when swiping the app away (where the app status is decided by Android, Schrödinger’s app paradox), but some users reported success if instead of swiping it you actually close it. The Close button appears in the main menu if you enable “Delete browsing data on quit” in Settings. eg. “Cached images and Files” is the least annoying option to select, careful not to select any of the others. So, when you want to close the app, just use the button and on the next start it should load pages normally.

Third, our own @linsui pointed that, we can just close the screen. No, not close the screen and throw the device in the first river (we recommend recycling the device anyway, either by giving it away to some person in need or using a specialized device recycling center), but more like… when you open the app, if you see it stand there doing nothing, lock the device and then unlock it. We don’t understand why this works for some, but surely it has to do with libraries and drivers and magic numbers.

As a reminder, there’s a reason why our fork of Firefox is named Fennec, it’s not about some code name anymore, but about the fact that our version is a work on top of Mozilla’s code. We need to extract all the bad (read non-FOSS, read privacy invading) code and give you a clean app that serves you and not some faceless corporation. Are we breaking some eggs to do this omelette? We sure are. And we do our best to serve it fast and tasty. Yet sometimes egg shells might end up in the final product.

@kitswa measures more metrics:

The F-Droid Metrics Dashboard has had some major updates. (Thanks to @keunes for their suggestions) Among other things, you can now get download and search count badges for your app via shields.io. A GitHub Actions cron job runs daily to keep the per-package stats in processed/monthly up-to-date. And the main page got a full UX redesign.

@shuvashish76 lights up some candles:

The Disroot project is a long time supporter of federation, decentralization and FLOSS. In their latest post, they celebrate 10 years of existence and reminisce about the road behind.

Removed Apps

3 apps were removed
  • EDS Lite: Virtual disk encryption (Security sensitive, not maintained, try some other app from the “File Encryption & Vault” category)
  • openWorkout: Simple workout trainer that puts your privacy first (Not actively maintained, try one of the other apps in our “Workout category)
  • Sobuu: Track books reading and organise your readings (Build issues, we hope it comes back soon)

Newly Added Apps

12 apps were newly added
  • AndroidCrypt: AES Crypt compatible file encryption utility
  • BatteryVoltageDisplay: BatteryVoltageDisplay shows battery voltage in the system status bar
  • Chronal: A metronome and tuner app designed for beginner and advanced musicians
  • Compete: Challenge everyone!
  • Daily You: Every day is worth remembering…
  • Flicky: Android TV Fdroid repositories client
  • oxproxion: Chat with OpenRouter LLMs
  • PhotoSwooper: A dating app for your photos
  • PlayOnDlna: Play Youtube videos ad-free on DLNA players (e.g. Kodi) in your local network!
  • ShikiApp: Unofficial Shikimori mobile app
  • SunProxy: Set up packet redirect rules (proxy) by VPN
  • Tomato: Minimalist Pomodoro timer

Downgraded Apps

1 apps were downgraded
  • Session F-Droid was downgraded from 1.27.0 to 1.26.0 as the latest version was crashing. A rebuild is in the works.

Updated Apps

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

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Find Apps

F-Droid is powered by your donations!

Connect

mastodon
@fdroidorg@floss.social

News