The F-Droid tools can automatically detect and build updates to apps and packages.

Detecting

There are various mechanisms in place for automatically detecting that updates are available for applications, with the UpdateCheckMode field in the metadata determining which method is used for a particular application.

Running the fdroid checkupdates command will apply this method to each application in the repository and update the CurrentVersion and CurrentVersionCode fields in the metadata accordingly.

As usual, the -p option can be used with this, to restrict processing to a particular application.

Note that this only updates the metadata such that we know what the current published/recommended version is. It doesn’t make that version available in the repository - for that, see the next section.

Adding

Adding updates (i.e. new versions of applications already included in the repository) happens in two ways. The simple case is applications where the APK files are binaries, retrieved from a developer’s published build. In this case, all that’s required is to place the new binary in the Repo directory, and the next run of fdroid update will pick it up.

For applications built from source, it is necessary to add a new Build Version line to the metadata file. At the very least, the version name, version code and commit will be different. It is also possible that the additional build flags will change between versions.

For processing multiple updates in the metadata at once, it can be useful to run fdroid update --interactive. This will check all the applications in the repository, and where updates are required you will be prompted to [E]dit the metadata, [I]gnore the update, or [Q]uit altogether.