F-Droid Ships Version 2.0, Its Biggest Update in a Decade, as Google's Developer Verification Deadline Looms
F-Droid's Kotlin/Compose rewrite modernizes the open-source Android app store as Google's developer verification rules, which F-Droid once said could end its project, begin rolling out September 30.
Overview
F-Droid, the free and open-source software repository for Android, released version 2.0 on September 24, describing it as “the largest app update in 10 years” and a complete redesign of the official client app. According to heise online, the release is “the biggest app update in ten years,” built on a codebase reprogrammed with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose. The update arrives as F-Droid continues to warn that Google’s developer verification requirements threaten its ability to distribute apps outside the Play Store.
What’s New
The redesign followed more than a year of development and 14 test releases before its public launch. The F-Droid team simplified the app’s main navigation into three core areas: Discover, Search and My Apps, moving settings and the Nearby Swap feature to the top bar so they no longer compete for space in the primary navigation.
The new Discover screen surfaces newly added apps, recently updated software, and the most-downloaded titles in the repository. The category system was also expanded significantly: F-Droid now distinguishes between 17 different game genres rather than grouping all games together, alongside new dedicated categories for VPNs, password managers and firewalls, a change independently confirmed by heise online.
Search now scans app descriptions, categories and translated content in addition to app names, with major improvements for users searching in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. The app also remembers recent search queries, and adds filters that can be combined across category, device compatibility, and anti-feature exclusions.
Installation and Platform Changes
F-Droid 2.0 takes advantage of newer Android platform capabilities that the team says became available “thanks largely to pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and anti-trust actions around the world”. The app now uses a unified installer across all F-Droid installation methods, backed by Android’s new pre-approval API, which lets users confirm an install immediately after choosing it rather than only after the app finishes downloading. Both F-Droid’s own announcement and heise online’s reporting describe this as bringing F-Droid’s install experience closer to that of Android’s built-in app store.
Several longstanding features changed or were dropped. Automatic background update checks are now enabled by default, and the pull-to-refresh gesture — previously used to manually trigger a repository check — now only scrolls the list; manual refresh moved into the overflow menu on the My Apps screen. F-Droid’s Tor auto-detection setting was also simplified and migrated into generic proxy settings. The app’s privacy-oriented “disguise” feature, which lets users hide F-Droid behind a different icon and name, was redesigned to more accurately reflect its limits: the app will still be visible in Android’s system app list and detectable during forensic inspection. Notably, the ability to remotely wipe apps in response to a panic trigger has not yet returned in 2.0; F-Droid says users who rely on that feature may want to postpone updating while it evaluates bringing it back. The release also drops support for Android 6 and no longer uses the F-Droid Privileged Extension, relying instead on Android’s native session installer for background updates.
F-Droid credited developer Torsten Grote’s work on the new app to funding from NLnet through its Mobifree fund, with additional support from the Open Technology Fund’s User Experience & Discovery Lab, the Calyx Institute, and NGI. The Open Technology Fund’s Security Lab, working with Convocation, conducted an independent security review of the release.
The Developer Verification Backdrop
The redesign lands against a tense backdrop for alternative Android app stores. As heise online reports, F-Droid warned in a blog post last year that Google’s forthcoming developer verification requirements would prevent alternative app stores from offering apps directly, since they have no control over developer keys or identities and cannot force independent open-source contributors to register with Google. The team wrote at the time that “the developer registration regulation will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution channels as we know them today,” according to heise.
Google has since announced concessions, per the same report: experienced users will be able to install apps from unverified developers after a one-time setup process, and hobby developers can get free accounts covering up to 20 devices without identity verification. The verification requirement is set to take effect first on September 30 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Despite the ongoing threat, F-Droid’s current blog post states that the changes in version 2.0 have created “the foundation for the development of F-Droid” for the next decade, as quoted by heise.
What We Don’t Know
F-Droid has not published a timeline for when the app-wiping panic feature might return, saying only that it is evaluating the best path forward based on user feedback. The full scope of Google’s developer verification rollout beyond its initial four launch countries, and how it will ultimately affect F-Droid’s app distribution model long-term, also remains to be seen.