2025 was a big year for F-Droid. Not only did we celebrate 15 years of securely distributing FOSS apps to users around the world, we onboarded new maintainers, board members and project collaborators, invested in infrastructure upgrades, and played an active role in independent app store and FOSS developer advocacy.

Community, Contributions, and Shared Impact

F-Droid’s impact in 2025 was the result of many different kinds of contributions. Developers publishing and maintaining free and open source apps, contributors maintaining build infrastructure, reviewing app submissions, improving tooling, and writing documentation, translators expanding access across languages and regions, researchers and advocates translating technical work in policy contexts, and donors whose support keeps F-Droid independent and accountable to its community.

Together, this work enables an app distribution ecosystem that is transparent, privacy respecting, and governed in the open.

Impact in Numbers

This year was another big year in terms of apps added, updated, built and distributed. Here are some quick stats at the end of December 2025.

Total number of apps on the main repo: We currently have 4,061 apps on the main repo, an increase of 547 apps since last year, ~21% are built reproducibly, signed by the developers, further expanding the variety of open-source apps available to users.

App Updates: Each of them were updated by the developer approximately three times, making the number of updates 13,489, keeping the app catalogue fresh and secure.

Cumulative App Updates and Downloads: In 2025 F-Droid users cumulatively updated and downloaded apps over 18 million times. This number is extrapolated since the infrastructure we have is meant to protect user privacy. We will be publishing an F-Droid downloads post in the near future to further expand on this topic.

Archived Apps: We parted with 1554 apps as tech moves on and devs do too.

Strengthening our Foundations in 2025

A large portion of our work this year focused on strengthening F-Droid’s foundations.

F-Droid Client

In 2025, we began a major overhaul of the F-Droid client to make finding, understanding, and managing apps easier without compromising privacy or user control. To start, we completed work to move towards Material Design, adopting updated visuals, edge-to-edge layout and refined UI elements.

In addition to the Material Design upgrade, the official F-Droid client is being overhauled using modern Android tooling, with a focus on reducing technical debt and making future development more approachable for contributors.

Key improvements include a complete UI rewrite using Kotlin Compose, improved search that includes descriptions and translations, better discovery of new and updated apps, installation approval before downloads begin, support for multiple simultaneous downloads and updates, clear notifications when app issues arise, such as signing key changes, and optional Material You theming.

Alongside these user facing changes, we completed internal refactoring, modernized libraries, improved testing workflows, and simplified maintenance. This work directly supports contributor onboarding, reduces long term risk, and makes it easier to respond to future platform changes.

Build Infrastructure and Maintenance

Behind the scenes, we continued improving the infrastructure that builds, verifies, and publishes apps for the main F-Droid repository.

This included ongoing work on Buildbot, reproducible builds, repository tooling, metadata cleanup, translation automation, library maintenance, and compatibility testing with upcoming Android versions. We also continued modernization efforts working on Nearby app sharing, migrating Gradle build scripts from Groovy to Kotlin DSL, and adapting upstream changes in Maven Central.

This kind of infrastructure work is rarely visible, but it is essential to maintaining trust at scale.

Core Server Upgrade

One of the most tangible improvements in 2025 was the replacement of F-Droid’s core build and publishing server.

The previous system’s hardware was over a decade old and it had been running continuously for years. While it served the project well, it had become a bottleneck and an increasing maintenance burden.

Thanks entirely to community donations, we were able to replace this critical piece of infrastructure. The new server significantly improves build performance, allowing us to run the full repository pipeline more frequently and reduce the delay between developer updates and user availability.

We were deliberate about how this server is hosted. It is physically controlled in a data center by a long time contributor with a proven security track record. We know exactly where it is, who has access, and how it is managed. This level of transparency is rare in infrastructure, but it aligns with our values and threat model. This upgrade exists because of community support and it strengthens the entire ecosystem.

Grant Funded Work in Service of Sustainability and Decentralization

While donations remain central to F-Droid’s independence, grants in 2025 allowed us to dedicate focused time to work that benefits both F-Droid and the broader free software ecosystem.

OTF FOSS Sustainability Grant

The Open Technology Fund’s FOSS Sustainability grant supports projects that provide critical digital infrastructure and need time and space to strengthen internal sustainability.

For F-Droid, this grant enabled work that is difficult to fund through feature driven development alone.

In 2025, we completed three major objectives under this grant including a substantial refactor of the Android client to improve development and testing workflows, modernization of internal tooling and libraries, and concrete progress on governance, establishing policies and legal strategies to make F-Droid more resilient. This work is ongoing as the landscape evolves and it is necessary to respond to new challenges.

Beyond these deliverables, we continued work on additional objectives focused on understanding how FOSS projects manage donations, how communities perceive funding practices, and what sustainable, value aligned funding can look like in practice.

This research is not only inward facing. We published an extensive blog series detailing our legal resilience research and we are preparing to share our FOSS donations campaigns findings openly with other projects via blog articles and hosting a workshop at FOSDEM 2026. If you are planning on attending FOSDEM, we look forward to seeing you there!

Mobifree: Decentralized App Distribution in Practice

Mobifree is an EU funded research and development project focused on giving European citizens and organizations more choice in, and access to, human-centered and ethical mobile software. The project supports independence from gatekeeper platforms, closed-source software and harvesting user data.

The core idea behind Mobifree is that competition, user choice, and digital sovereignty require real alternatives that work within existing developer workflows while offering users meaningful freedom.

F-Droid played a central role in Mobifree, contributing across research, software development, and ecosystem building, specifically in the area of FOSS app distribution.

Our work included improving Repomaker, a tool that allows users and organizations to create and share their own app repositories, building and expanding Appiverse, a catalogue of known F-Droid compatible repositories designed to improve interoperability between app stores, creating an API that allows alternative distributors to discover, verify, and reuse repositories, expanding Fastlane tooling so developers can integrate F-Droid distribution into their existing release workflows and integrating results from user research directly into our software design updates.

We worked closely with partners including Waag, BioSense, University of Amsterdam, Murena, and e Foundation, supporting in the user testing and workshops and have already begun analysing and mapping out how to implement the user feedback.

In 2025, we presented our work to the European Commission during the Mobifree 18 month review. This was an important moment to demonstrate that decentralized, privacy respecting app distribution is not theoretical. It is already being built, tested, and improved in the open.

In 2026, we will continue Mobifree work by implementing user test feedback across the F-Droid website, client, Appiverse and Repomaker, further improving usability and clarity.

Policy Engagement and Legal Resilience

As F-Droid entered its 15th year, policy and legal work became increasingly important.

In 2025, we published an extensive research driven blog series addressing issues many FOSS projects quietly struggle with, including how to handle legal takedown requests, how to respond when authorities request user or project information, jurisdiction, liability, and legal entity considerations
and how regulatory frameworks like the Digital Markets Act, Digital Services Act, Online Safety Act, and Google’s developer verification requirements affect independent app distribution.

Our work on Google’s developer verification requirements highlighted how policy and platform changes can create new barriers for developers and app stores. We engaged publicly and constructively on this issue, helping surface concerns around access, proportionality, and unintended consequences. We will continue to address this issue during a main track presentation at FOSDEM in 2026.

We also participated in DMA related workshops and events, contributing the perspective of a long running, community governed app distribution platform. Our goal is not simply compliance, but ensuring regulation does not reinforce gatekeeping or undermine independent, privacy respecting alternatives.

This work matters because policy decisions made today shape the ecosystem for years to come.

FLOSS Fund Recognition and Community Sustainability

In 2025, F-Droid was honoured to be selected as a FLOSS/fund recipient. FLOSS/fund recognizes that much of the modern technological landscape and even the internet itself is built by individuals and communities in the form of free and open source software.

They do this not only by pledging $1 million a year to FOSS projects, but by creating a donation registry called funding.json where FOSS projects can easily communicate their projects and financial needs, making it easier for donors to find the projects they love and show support.

We will be using the funds we received to embed the funding.json into the F-Droid app submission process, so new apps will have the option to be featured in the FLOSS Fund directory. Funding will also be used to improve our donation campaign and fundraising efforts in general, making F-Droid more financially sustainable long term.

Looking Ahead to 2026

Plans include participating in FOSDEM in Brussels, hosting a booth there to engage with participants, co-organizing the FOSS on Mobile developer room, presenting at the Funding FOSS developer room and presenting our main track presentation on Google’s developer verification requirements, We will continue to contribute to the Mobifree project, move our deliverables outlined in the OTF FOSS sustainability fund forward, and continue improving the client, website, server and other core infrastructure, working to make F-Droid better and easier to onboard new users.

To everyone who has donated to F-Droid over the years, and especially to those who supported us in 2025: thank you. Your support keeps F-Droid independent, privacy respecting, and accountable to its community.

F-Droid has shown for 15 years that app distribution can be transparent, privacy respecting, and accountable. In 2025, we strengthened that foundation. In 2026, we will continue to build for the future of FOSS.