Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app store has gone 10 years without a major update. That’s finally changing: After a multiyear effort, the team has just announced F-Droid 2.0 is rolling out.
The new F-Droid client was redesigned from scratch in Kotlin Compose, which is the standard for modern Android apps. This makes the store much more responsive, and there’s optional support for Android’s Material theming. The interface has also been cleaned up considerably, making the most important functions easier to access and hiding some others in overflow menus.
While the new F-Droid looks nicer, the update was largely about making it easier to find and install apps. When F-Droid first appeared, there wasn’t much to see, but now it has thousands of open source apps. Unlike the Play Store, F-Droid doesn’t track your taps and installs to push ads and suggestions—it helps you find things and gets out of the way.
F-Droid now includes a huge number of categories, drilling down to specialized niches like firewalls, password managers, and VPNs. You can see all these groups in the search tab. There are also higher-level categories listed on the main Discover page. When searching for apps, F-Droid will now be able to return results based on app descriptions rather than just names.
When you find an app, F-Droid 2.0 will make the installation process easier. Google has long put up roadblocks for sideloaded apps, citing the security implications. This is also the rationale behind its upcoming developer verification system. For now at least, apps will be easier to install from F-Droid thanks to the use of Google’s pre-approval API. Instead of downloading an APK, opening it, and confirming the scary sideloading pop-up, you’ll just be able to verify that you want to install an app before the download. So you tap “Install” in F-Droid, and then tap “Install” again in a system pop-up. That’s one more click than the Play Store, but it’s still an improvement.