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...

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....

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...