F-Droid

Practical results

Posted on Nov 27, 2025 by Licaon_Kter

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 27 Nov 2025, Week 48

F-Droid core

In the process of doing all this development work, we ran mass rebuilds of the whole collection of apps, killing two birds with one stone. First, it served to test our new build automation with the existing apps, and second, it showed us which apps are reproducible. For the apps that were not reproducible, we have looked into fixes in our stack, in upstream build tools, and in the apps themselves.

We mapped out all the issues we have encountered caused by running builds in VMs versus containers. There are two classes:

  • Builds needing privileged calls that containers normally do not support in production setups (e.g. direct writes to sysctl or /sys/devices/system/cpu/)
  • The methods of presenting CPU and RAM limits are implemented differently between virtualization (e.g. libvirt) and containerization (e.g. Podman), and are not interchangeable. This can lead to build differences and we currently know of no workaround or fix for this.

There is not final statistic as apps builds change with each cycle, but currently we see about 68% reproducible builds.

NOTE: Our verification server shows if apps packages were reproducible against our published APKs on f-droid.org, when the F-Droid buildserver is used as the build environment. We don’t yet surface information if an app is reproducible against the upstream developer builds, but one can see this in each app’s web page by following the “Build Metadata” link, and search if there’s a field named AllowedAPKSigningKeys present near the end.

Community News

Ente Photos - Encrypted photo storage was updated to 1.2.20 and Notesnook - Private notes app was updated to 3.3.9. Following our mention on a Tuta & Ente partnership back in Oct 17 TWIF, here comes another offer between Notesnook and Ente. Access the Notesnook offer and here’s the Ente offer.

Oh, talk about photo apps, Immich was updated to 2.3.1, and reading their latest October recap I noticed OCR being mentioned. So here’s a challenge from me, which one do you find better, Immich’s OCR or Ente’s OCR?

K-9 Mail and Thunderbird: Free Your Inbox were updated to 14.0 and Thunderbird Beta for Testers was updated to 15.0b1. Thunderbird for Android has been out for just over a year so the team prepared a special retrospective post (and a bonus 1 hour long discussion) with the mobile team to look back at what they were able to accomplish this last year, what they’re still working on, and what’s up ahead. /PS: While I, for one, hate the “new” Account Drawer thing, hearing about JMAP being worked on makes me happy.

Proton Pass: Password Manager was updated to 1.35.1 and ProtonVPN - Secure and Free VPN was updated to 5.14.65.0, and they are now joined by the new Proton Authenticator, Private, secure, offline 2FA across devices, raising the number of Proton apps to four.

Saracroche, Block unwanted spam calls automatically and protect your privacy if you’re France, was just added. Camille Bouvat, the developer, gave an interview (in French) back in September to talk about how the app came into existence and how you can help to make it better.

Missed last week, Status: Ethereum Crypto Wallet 2.34.4 will be the last version in this current form as the app will be replaced by a new one soon. The devs wrote a post explaining the reasons why and how to switch when ready. What about the new app? It’s called “the Unified Status Mobile App” and it’s work in progress, sharing an unified code-base with the Desktop client, running on QT version 6. F-Droid will be supported, as we can read in the revealing post but it might take some time until then. NOTE: Pre-built QT libs are no longer available under a FLOSS license hence we’ll need to first built QT6 before building the app. A dauting task no less, but doable as we already build plenty of other apps like this.

@linsui checks a signing key:

Syncthing-Fork was updated to 2.0.11.3 and Syncthing-Lite was updated to 2.0.0.1, but they are now both under a new development team. There was bit of a mystery about why, how and when the original developer handed over the keys and blessings to the new team, and you can follow some of the discussions in this upstream issue and this long forum thread. Both apps are built reproducible which means that the guarantees mentioned in our inclusion page are helpful in assessing the situation.

Newly Added Apps

11 more apps were newly added
  • Al-Quran - Simple: A simple open-source Quran reader
  • BikeBridge: Companion app for e-bikes and components
  • ciphernotes: Client-side encrypted notes that sync across devices
  • Dnd Toggle: Toggle DND from a Quick Settings tile
  • IPerf3Client: iPerf3 is a tool for active measurements of the max bandwidth on IP networks
  • Janus: Contextual translations using Wikipedia’s knowledge graph
  • Mental Math: Practice mental arithmetic solo or compete with friends
  • Quotes - Quotes Status Creator: Quotes Status Creator lets you share quotations as images on social media
  • Repertoire: An app for musicians to track their repertoire and media
  • Sift: A minimalist, open-source recipe keeper
  • WiFi Exporter: Export your WiFi passwords (requires root)

Updated Apps

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

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