F-Droid

Website gets some love

Posted on Feb 27, 2026 by paulali

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 27 Feb 2026, Week 9

F-Droid core

Banners aside, we’ve been working a lot behind the scenes on our website. Several functional and textual changes were on our TODO for years, just waiting for the right people to sit down and type the right words in their editors.

Textual changes? We’ve rewritten our About, added Licenses, refined the Inclusion Policy, rechecked Contribute, upgraded Repomaker and detailed Donate. We also reordered top items, removed “Forum” entry (still in “About”), and more, to better describe our mission, what qualities F-Droid brings to the Android ecosystem, how to reach us, how to help and how to get help. If everything is not yet translated into your language please lend a hand in Weblate as the volume was rather high in a short period of time.

Functional changes? Our website tooling needs specialized knowledge, and while we got contributors to help along the way, as mentioned in passed TWIFs, it needs someone to dig, test, rip out, test, rewrite, test some more, in a focused way to improve it. In the last months we got this help, switched to using index-v2 repository data and fixed some old pain points. With this modern format we can now show per app version changelogs, show Anti-Features details, so you know why these were added (already available in Client) and we fixed some missing permissions listings.

Flicky was updated to 4.2.3 and Neo Store to 1.2.4 adding the usual UX polish and bug fixes. The apps are also joining F-Droid in the initiative to inform their users via an in-app banner about the campaign to keep Android open.

In terminal land, the CLI client fdroidcl also added a banner in their Readme.

Community News

Conversations and Quicksy were updated to 2.19.11+free and then, a day later, to 2.19.12+free. The first update improved invitations flow, touched the MUC UX, fixed sharing IRC bridged channels, improved connection behavior with VPNs and Airplane mode and fixed four reported security issues. As the users got the update, some were no longer being able to login when using older server versions, eg. prosody 0.11 or ejabberd 23.01, as they can’t handle the hardened security setup. If you’ve updated to 2.19.12 and you still can’t connect, you can try to toggle off TLSv1.3 and/or Channel Binding in Settings > Security. But more importantly, please contact your server admin and ask them to upgrade, as they are 3 years or more behind security fixes. Also give them this link so they know to do it faster before they are cut off from federation next month.

Ente Photos - Encrypted photo storage was updated to 1.3.15 and 1.3.16. If you are part of the 0.003% app users who run it on x86 or x86_64 Android devices be aware that 1.3.15 is the last version for you.

Godot Engine 4 had an update this week, but we had to disable it. A library mix-up made all 4.6.1 packages be marked installable on all architectures, meaning that the highest versionCode package would be used for all. For arm64 users, the vast majority, there will be no issue, but for the rest the app would just crash. We are working on a recipe fix.

Until then, you can peruse the release notes and maybe think about attending the GodotCon Amsterdam convention on 23rd, 24th of April.

RHVoice - a free and open source speech synthesize was updated to 1.18.1 after one year of intense work. The app has now Material 3 theming and edge-to-edge support, on top of a lot of fixes.

Tor VPN Beta, Tor-powered with per-app routing, access unblocking & network-level privacy, was just added. F-Droid’s history goes a long way in regards with collaborations with the Tor Project, via Guardian Project. We used to have the Guardian Project repo added by default in Client because their apps were useful and always just around the corner to be added in F-Droid. One such beloved app is Orbot, the proxy and VPN client that routes all connections through the Tor network. Fun fact: the in-Client “Use Tor” button was added expecting that Orbot will come to F-Droid “real soon now”, and other apps thought the same.

Unfortunately that did not happen, creating a chicken-and-egg issue for users that needed to jump through extra hoops to find Orbot and use the Client, making Tor usage an “expert” level flow. Over the years, in order to allow any user of any tech experience be able to easily access Tor, Orbot (under the Guardian Project development) grew to emphasis the VPN mode and the Tor Project created the newly added app which removes the proxy mode altogether.

A guide on how to use the app can be found here.

F-Droid Client 2.0 is in development, and we are redesigning the proxy experience to simplify it.

Newly Added Apps

3 more apps were newly added
  • CajuScan: Record invoices in the Cashew app by scanning the QR code on Portuguese invoices
  • Chord Progression Helper: A music app to write chord progressions, add simple drum beats and more
  • EstudiaTAI: Practice tests for the Spanish AGE IT Assistant exams

Updated Apps

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

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

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