F-Droid’s Android app store has been rebuilt from the ground up.
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.
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