The F-Droid community has been discussing how to measure what apps are popular for a long time. From 2012 through 2015, some simple download counts were maintained in fdroiddata. We also sketched out an idea based on Debian’s “Popularity Contest”. Then we determined a safe way to gather logs from...

GitLab CI (Continuous Integration) has become an essential part of the F-Droid community processes. It is free software, built on open standards, and works well. The last piece that is missing from our testing ecosystem is a reliable way to run tests in actual Android emulators. Thanks to pushes from...

There is a new story to add to the list of horrors of Surveillance Capitalism: the United States’ Military is purchasing tracking and location data from companies that track many millions of people. Users must have real options for stepping out of “big tech”, where tracking dominates. We review all...

F-Droid has a long history of transparently warning users about potential risks with apps we’re distributing. Our team is currently specifically focusing on: tracking. Usually tracking is perfectly opaque to users. In privacy policies this collected data often is described as metadata, which is usually is a crude over-simplification. Metadata...

Thanks to the efforts of many volunteer contributors, the F-Droid website is now available in Japanese. While the main pages and tutorials have been completed, the FAQs and app descriptions are still in progress. Those interested in adding to these translations, or improving existing translations, are encouraged to contribute via...

For F-Droid to be trusted, we need to be transparent. Making it easy for people to pay attention to all the processes and systems we use helps us stay secure. One thing that Debian and other GNU/Linux distros have proven over the past decades is that transparency is an effective...

fdroidserver is the core collection of tools for building apps, scanning them for issues or Anti-Features, collecting the resulting files into repos, and publishing them to the world. Today, a big update was released which has a large number of changes and updates that have been a long time coming....

F-Droid is a robot with a passion for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), and now F-Droid has a new helper: issuebot! It started life as a hacked together script running on the RFP tracker, where it was doing some automated checks on the information that people submitted in their...