When we built the next-generation F-Droid client, we rewrote our code to fit into re-usable libraries, so other projects can make use of F-Droid technology with minimal hassle. The libraries So far, we have published three libraries. Two of them are written in Kotlin multi-platform, so they can be used...

THE INTERNET, 20 March 2023 — The global F-Droid community is pleased to announce that it has officially accepted the merge request to adopt an official governance plan, and an inaugural board of directors consisting of community-nominated members. The community has been legally established through The Commons Conservancy, a Netherlands-based...

VPNs have become popular and are often touted as a tool to improve privacy. While this is sometimes true, it is important to tread carefully when choosing an VPN. A good place to start is looking at which VPN providers meet the requirements for running a trustworthy VPN service. A...

We just released version 1.16 of the official F-Droid client app for Android which includes many radical changes under the hood as well as many bug fixes for long standing issue. Read on for more details. Growing repository size As more and more apps make their way into F-Droid, the...

In 2022, the German company SHIFT donated three smartphones of their model SHIFT6mq as a loan for life to F-Droid team members. This was done without asking for anything in return. However, we do want to share our experiences with the devices. The SHIFT6mq phone © SHIFT. First of all,...

A common criticism directed at F-Droid is that F-Droid signs published APKs with its own keys. Using our own keys doesn’t mean insecure — we have a good track record (and keep the keys on a dedicated, air-gapped, offline machine) whilst others may not — but this does mean that...

We received an audit on the new “index-v2” work in official Android client app + API (3 days) and the new front end webserver setup (1 day). There were no findings for the webserver setup, so the analysis in this post deals with the F-Droid client app. The audit was...

A modern Android smartphone relies on a lot of services, from app stores and calendars to messaging and push notifications. Most of them have open alternatives, but until now, the only option for push notifications was Google’s proprietary service, Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). UnifiedPush is a new alternative that allows...