After more than a year of hard work, we are thrilled to announce the launch of F-Droid

2.0, a complete redesign of the official F-Droid app and the largest app update

in 10 years.

For more than a decade, F-Droid has helped people discover and install free and

open source Android apps. F-Droid 2.0 builds on that foundation with a modern

interface, better app discovery, improved search, and a simpler experience that

works well, whether you’re new to F-Droid or have been using it for years.

This isn’t just a visual refresh. The user experience was redesigned to

integrate smoothly with current Android patterns, like Material Design, while

keeping familiar F-Droid interactions in place. Key components were reworked and

rewritten using Kotlin Compose, the standard toolkit these days, creating a

foundation that will help us deliver improvements more quickly in the years

ahead.

We are excited to begin rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks

after 14 test releases.

What has changed?

One of our main goals for F-Droid 2.0 was to make it easier to discover,

install, and maintain the apps you rely on. We simplified the main

navigation into three core areas: Discover, Search and My Apps. Categories are

now integrated into Discover, making it easier to browse and explore, while My

Apps provides a central place to manage installed apps, updates, and potential

issues. Settings and Nearby Swap are still only a tap away from the top bar, but

no longer compete for space in the main navigation.

Discoverability improvements

Helping people discover relevant free and open source software (FOSS) was one of the

primary goals of F-Droid 2.0. As the F-Droid ecosystem has grown to thousands of

applications, finding the right app has become increasingly challenging. The new

release introduces improvements throughout the app from browsing and categories

to search to make it easier to find software that matches your needs. And of

course, F-Droid does this without tracking you, or trying to “engage” you to

spend increasingly more time in the app.

A redesigned Discover experience

The new Discover screen helps uncover apps you might otherwise miss. In addition

to highlighting newly added and recently updated apps, it now showcases the most

downloaded apps in the repository. Whether you’re new to F-Droid or looking for

something different, Discover provides several ways to explore the growing

ecosystem of free and open source Android applications.

More useful categories

Categories play an important role in helping users browse the repository, so

we’ve expanded and refined them significantly, including more specialized

categories that make it easier to find specific types of apps, such as VPNs,

firewalls, password managers, launches and navigation tools. Here is what you

can expect:

First, we’ve significantly expanded the category system. Instead of relying on a small number of broad categories, F-Droid now includes many more specialized categories, helping you get closer to the kind of app you want in just a few taps, even before you start searching.

Second, to make this expanded category system easier to navigate, we’ve introduced higher-level “meta” categories in the Discover screen. These group related categories together and provide a more approachable entry point for browsing the growing F-Droid ecosystem.

Finally, categories now play a larger role throughout the app. Their names and descriptions are used to improve app discovery and help guide users toward relevant free and open source applications.

As an example of this effort, we’ve completely reworked the Games

category. Rather than grouping all games together, F-Droid 2.0 now distinguishes

between 17 different game genres, making it much easier to find the kinds of

games you actually enjoy playing.

Search that understands what you’re looking for

Search has also been significantly improved. In addition to app names, it can

now search app descriptions, categories, and translated content. This makes it

easier to find apps based on what they do rather than what they’re called.

We’ve also made major improvements for users searching in Chinese, Japanese, and

Korean. The new search system provides much better support for CJK writing

systems, helping users find relevant apps more reliably in their own language.

Search also remembers your recent queries, allowing you to quickly return to

previous searches without having to type them again.

Powerful filtering, made approachable

Browsing and searching are only part of the story. F-Droid 2.0 also introduces

powerful filtering options that help you narrow down large lists of apps to

exactly what you’re looking for.

Filters can be combined using multiple criteria, such as app category, device

compatibility, or anti-features. For example, you can choose to view only Action

Games that are compatible with your device and exclude apps that depend on

non-free network services.

To help users discover these and other advanced capabilities, F-Droid 2.0

introduces onboarding screens throughout the app. Rather than hiding features

behind complex settings, the app provides contextual guidance to help both new

and experienced users get the most out of F-Droid.

Smooth installation experience wherever F-Droid runs

For the longest time, the experience of clicking install or update was forced to

be second rate by Android. Now, thanks largely to pressure from the EU’s Digital

Markets Act (DMA) and anti-trust actions around the world, Android offers all

app stores an option for a smoother and more automatic install and update

experience than before. F-Droid 2.0 includes groundbreaking work on utilizing

these new abilities. This allows F-Droid to use a unified installer for all

F-Droid installs, whether built into the OS or you installed it on your device

yourself. The unified installer makes use of the new pre-approval API, so that

on supported devices the user can confirm right after deciding to install the

app, instead of after the app was downloaded. That brings the F-Droid install

experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app

store can provide.

What moved, and what was removed

A redesign of this size means making careful decisions about what belongs in the

new app, what can be handled differently, and what no longer makes sense to

carry forward. Some familiar features have changed, moved, or been removed as

part of making F-Droid 2.0 more streamlined and easier to maintain, without

sacrificing core functionality or features users rely on.

Update checks now happen automatically

F-Droid 2.0 now fetches and installs app updates by default. If you prefer more

control, no worries, your existing preferences are still respected.

Some users missed the pull-to-refresh gesture for checking all repositories for

updates. In F-Droid 2.0, the pulling gesture is exclusively for scrolling. This

is now possible because the app can now automatically check for updates in the

background. Rather than preserving a familiar action, we focused on removing the

need for it. The best refresh button is the one you never have to press.

Users who want more control still have fine-grained and manual update options

available. If you used pull-to-refresh to manually trigger updates, that is now

available under the action overflow menu, e.g. the “three dots”, on the My Apps

screen.

Data usage settings

F-Droid gives you control of what get’s downloaded when. This helps fit our

diverse users around the world, who have varying requirements. Many users have

cheap access to mobile data, while mobile data is prohibitively expensive for

others. Some users have heightened privacy requirements, so they need to

control their network traffic. While others are using limited devices which bog

down when F-Droid updates in the background. The settings which control all this

were reworked to make adapting F-Droid to your needs more intuitive.

Privacy and security features

Some F-Droid users operate in environments where simply having certain apps

installed or even using F-Droid can attract unwanted attention. To help support

these users, F-Droid has long included a set of privacy and security features

designed to protect both the user and their data.

One key privacy tool is Tor, and F-Droid has long supported using Tor for all

network connections, and using Tor Onion Services for repositories and mirrors.

The landscape of how Tor is integrated into Android has changed quite a bit

since Tor support was first integrated. Now there is TorVPN, Orbot, TorServices

and more. We took this opportunity to simplify the settings and remove the

auto-detection that was no longer reliable. If you enabled “Use Tor”, that will

be migrated to generic Proxy Settings. Going forward, Tor VPN is the recommended

approach for easy Tor support, and the Proxy Settings are still available for

those who need manual control.

Another key part is the set of “panic” features, which allow users to quickly

remove some specific kinds of sensitive information from their device in

emergency situations. These features are still included in F-Droid 2.0 and

remain an important part of supporting users with elevated security needs.

Notably, the F-Droid app hiding feature has been simplified, to give users an

accurate idea of the kind of protection they can expect. F-Droid was one of the

first apps that began providing app hiding features to protect user privacy,

including our “panic” feature which disguised the F-Droid app as a simple

calculator app. This simple feature was requested by many users, and since then

Orbot, TorVPN, Signal and others have added such masking features. Over time, a

standard design has emerged across widely used apps, and we have adopted this

design in the new release as well. This feature is designed so that users can

better understand the limits of the disguise. Instead of the mask looking and

functioning as a simple calculator app, now the mask only affects the app icon,

name and nothing else. This informs users that the F-Droid app will still appear

in the “Apps” settings and would be detectable during forensic inspection. This

change will hopefully make it easier for users to understand the limits of this

feature, while still utilizing it when needed.

One feature that has not yet returned is the ability to remove and wipe apps as

a response to a panic trigger app like Ripple. We recognize that some users

rely on this functionality for privacy and personal safety reasons and

understand it is more than a usability feature. However, it requires highly

specialized work to maintain, and given the small user base, we felt it should

no longer block so many other important improvements.

The app-wiping feature remains an important feature. We would

especially welcome feedback from people who use it, to help us

understand how and when it is used, so we can evaluate the best path

forward as we continue improving F-Droid 2.0. Users who rely on

the current app-wiping implementation may opt to postpone updating to

F-Droid 2.0 while we evaluate bringing the feature back.

For Android versions that integrate F-Droid

F-Droid is designed to be integrated into any version of Android or AOSP, as we

can see in CalyxOS, emteriaOS, iodéOS, Lineage-for-microG and ShiftOS. Each OS

can include their own repositories by default using the “additional repos”

mechanism. If you use one of these OSes, these will be visible in your

Repositories overview. For additional info on what changed, check out this

blog post.

Also, F-Droid Privileged Extension (FPE) is not currently supported by 2.0. That

means even if FPE is installed, F-Droid 2.0 won’t use it. This overhaul focused

on full featured support for the Android “session” installer. That lets F-Droid

run background updates on any recent Android version without requiring FPE. Like

with any of the changes here, we welcome feedback.

Lowering the barrier for contributors

While many of the improvements in F-Droid 2.0 are visible on the surface, some

of the most important changes happened behind the scenes.

All new code in this effort uses modern Android code standards and designs. This

gives us a codebase that is easier to maintain, test, and easier to extend with

new features in the future.

One of the goals of the rewrite was to lower the barrier for new

contributors. Android development has changed significantly over the past

decade, and F-Droid 2.0 is now built using Kotlin, the language that has become

the standard for modern Android development. This makes it easier for developers

familiar with today’s Android ecosystem to contribute to the project.

The new user interface is built with Jetpack Compose, the standard toolkit for

Android applications. Beyond simplifying development, this helped us align

F-Droid more closely with Material Design, the design system used throughout

Android. As a result, F-Droid feels more familiar to Android users while

remaining true to its own identity and values.

Most importantly, these changes provide a foundation for the next decade of

F-Droid development. By reducing maintenance burden and making contributions

easier, we can spend more time improving the experience for users and less time

fighting technical debt. Some new tools also depend on fixes in Android itself,

one such fix was added in Android 7 forcing us to drop support for Android 6. As

always, old F-Droid releases will continue to work on old Android versions.

A community effort

F-Droid 2.0 is one of the largest and most ambitious projects in our

history. Bringing it to life required much more than software development. It

involved user research, design, testing, documentation, community feedback,

quality assurance, lots of new code, a security audit and countless discussions

about how F-Droid should evolve over the next decade.

This work was made possible by the support of many organizations and

individuals. Torsten Grote’s development work on the new app was funded by

NLnet through the

Mobifree

fund. The Open Technology Fund’s User Experience & Discovery

Lab supported user research and design

work, bringing in Ura Design to help conduct user testing,

develop user stories, and refine our Human Interface Guidelines.

Additional support came from the Open Technology Fund’s Free and Open Source

Software (FOSS) Sustainability

Fund,

NGI, Mobifree, and the Calyx

Institute, whose sponsorship helps support the ongoing

maintenance

and long-term sustainability of the F-Droid ecosystem.

As part of this effort, the Open Technology Fund’s Security Lab

in conjunction with Convocation conducted an independent

security review of F-Droid 2.0. We analysed and addressed all findings relevant

to the new application, helping ensure that the release meets the high security

standards our users expect. We look forward to sharing the full audit report

once it has been cleared for publication.

Just as importantly, F-Droid 2.0 reflects the contributions of many

volunteers. Community members contributed code, testing, bug reports, design

feedback, translations, documentation, UX discussions, and countless ideas

throughout the redesign process. Both long-time contributors and people making

their first contribution helped shape the final result.

Finally, this work would not have been possible without your support. Donations help fund many of the less

visible but essential activities that grants don’t always cover, including

community management, handling the issue backlog, quality assurance, release

management, and project coordination. These contributions help keep F-Droid

healthy long after a specific grant-funded project has ended.

The journey continues

F-Droid 2.0 represents a major milestone, but it is not the end of the story.

Rebuilding the app has given us a stronger foundation, yet there is still plenty

of work ahead.

As the rollout reaches more users, we expect to learn a great deal from

real-world usage. Community feedback has shaped F-Droid 2.0 from its earliest

design discussions through many alpha and RC releases, and it will continue to

guide future improvements. Some ideas did not make it into the initial release,

while other features are still evolving as we gather feedback and refine their

design.

In the coming months, we will continue improving performance, accessibility, app

discovery, and overall usability. We’ll also keep listening to users as they

adapt to the new experience and help us identify opportunities for further

improvement.

Like every major F-Droid release before it, version 2.0 is not a destination,

it’s the beginning of the next chapter.

The future of Nearby

One area that continues to evolve is Nearby, the feature that allows users to

share apps directly between devices without relying on a central server.

The broader F-Droid 2.0 redesign gave us an opportunity to rethink Nearby from

the ground up. We have been working on a new implementation based on improved

connection methods that should make sharing apps more reliable and easier to

use.

This work is not quite ready for inclusion in the initial F-Droid 2.0 release,

but development is actively underway

and the foundations are already in place. If Nearby sharing is important to you,

now is an excellent time to get involved. Community feedback and testing can

help shape the next generation of the feature before it reaches a wider

audience.

How you can help

F-Droid 2.0 is the result of thousands of hours of work from developers,

designers, testers, translators, donors, and community members around

the world. Now that it is reaching users, we’d love your help making it

even better.

If you’re receiving the update, take some time to explore the new

experience and let us know what you think. Whether you’ve found a bug,

have an idea for an improvement, or simply want to tell us what works

well, your feedback helps guide future development.

If you’d like to get more involved, there are many ways to contribute.

Help us test, translate and review

You can help test upcoming features, improve translations and

documentation, review issues, contribute code, or join discussions about

the future of the project. New contributors are always welcome.

Consider donating to F-Droid

And if you’re able, please consider supporting F-Droid financially. Donations

through Liberapay or

OpenCollective help fund the ongoing work that

keeps the project healthy between major releases, from infrastructure and

quality assurance to community support and project coordination.

F-Droid 2.0 is a major milestone, but the work continues. Thank you for helping

us build a free, open, and sustainable app ecosystem for Android.