News - page 12

Update to app descriptions

F-Droid aims to give app developers a nice way to present their apps to users. Each app can include descriptions, related metadata, and translations. We have just updated the list of HTML formatting tags that are allowed in app descriptions to make it clearer what works and what does not....

Upcoming alpha release of F-Droid Client

At long last, the first alpha of the big overhaul of the official F-Droid client app for Android is about to be released. This round of work was focused on modernizing some of the oldest code in the client: the downloading, index parsing, and database layer. This code is now...

Why curation and decentralization is better than millions of apps

Every desktop computer or mobile device comes with some form of “app store”. There is F-Droid for Android. Debian has “software repositories” at its core. Then there are the really big, proprietary ones: Apple App Store and Google Play. These have millions of apps, while Debian has tens of thousands,...

Free software and inspection are key to software we can trust

Inspecting software is essential for understanding what that piece of software is actually doing. And free software means that all users have the guaranteed opportunity to fully inspect the source code they rely on. The cyber-security industry is built on inspecting software to find malware and build up defenses. Malware...

Slowly getting faster

We have been a bit quiet recently on some fronts, like this blog and on merge requests to review. We strive to keep our users informed, and we always appreciate contributions, even when we cannot immediately review them. F-Droid started in 2010, so we have some technical debt and cannot...

Hurray, the F-Droid website is now in Indonesian!

The F-Droid website gives you access to various free software applications without the fear of losing your privacy or data; making it available in Indonesian is important for making free software widely used by the people of Indonesia. Thanks to the volunteers who made Indonesian support available for the F-Droid...

Maven Central is not as free as it looks

F-Droid is always commited to distribute FOSS Android apps. Building free software from source for Android comes with a different set of challenges from GNU/Linux distros like Debian. Android apps are cross-compiled: they are not built on the same OS as they run. On top of that, Android provides only...

Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates

Behind the scenes of F-Droid is a giant pile of automation to manage the process of building thousands of apps from source. This means checking out thousands of source repos, checking them all for updates, building and new releases, and securely signing them en masse. All builds are run in...

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