he F-Droid app was created in 2009 in the early days of Android and lots of its code is still that old. While the ecosystem has seen many drastic shifts, the F-Droid community heroically kept the app alive with band aids and chewing gum.
Therefore, we are especially thrilled to announce that the Mobifree programme of the Next Generation Internet initiative agreed to fund this monumental effort. With their support, we aim to modernize the F-Droid app with a focus on the user interface to make the app easier to use and more appealing especially for new users. At the same time, the modernization should make it easier and more attractive to contribute to the app while also making it easier for the maintainers to review and merge external contributions due to better test coverage and less code entanglement.
The rewrite will be exclusively in Kotlin and use Compose for the UI while using modern architectural patterns that will make the app easier to maintain and more fun to contribute to. It will also allow for a responsive UI that adapts to the available screen size, be it a phone, a foldable, a tablet or even a desktop screen
This is great news.
As an early Android user, the F-Droid app is challenging enough that I don’t recommend it to people, because I don’t have the time to hold their hand everyday. This is unfortunate as F-Droid repositories are the easiest way for non-technical people to get more privacy-friendly apps.
F-Droid has the potential to make a much a bigger impact on a relative basis. Most people with still use default app stores, but I think F-Droid still has a long way even among semi-technical audiences.
You could recommend droidify which is a bit more straightforward as a client.
does it support promptless automatic update installation?
I think it’s great news, I use Droid-ify, third party client, just because the official F-Droid app is not very good, and it could improve it a lot
