F-Droid 2.0: A New Chapter for Android Freedom | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

After more than a year of hard work, we are thrilled to announce the launch of F-Droid 2.0, a complete redesign of the official F-Droid app and the largest app update in 10 years. For more than a decade, F-Droid has helped people discover and install free and open source Android apps. F-Droid 2.0 builds on that foundation with a modern interface, better app discovery, improved search, and a simpler experience that works well, whether you’re new to F-Droid or have been using it for years. This isn’t just a visual refresh. The user experience was redesigned to integrate smoothly with current Android patterns, like Material Design, while keeping familiar F-Droid interactions in place. Key components were reworked and rewritten using Kotlin Compose, the standard toolkit these days, creating a foundation that will help us deliver improvements more quickly in the years ahead. We are excited to begin rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks after 14 test releases. What has changed? One of our main goals for F-Droid 2.0 was to make it easier to discover, install, and maintain the apps you rely on. We simplified the main navigation into three core areas: Discover, Search and My Apps. Categories are now integrated into Discover, making it easier to browse and explore, while My Apps provides a central place to manage installed apps, updates, and potential issues. Settings and Nearby Swap are still only a tap away from the top bar, but no longer compete for space in the main navigation. Discoverability improvements Helping people discover relevant free and open source software (FOSS) was one of the primary goals of F-Droid 2.0. As the F-Droid ecosystem has grown to thousands of applications, finding the right app has become increasingly challenging. The new release introduces improvements throughout the app from browsing and categories to search to make it easier to find software that matches your needs. And of course, F-Droid does this without tracking you, or trying to “engage” you to spend increasingly more time in the app. A redesigned Discover experience The new Discover screen helps uncover apps you might otherwise miss. In addition to highlighting newly added and recently updated apps, it now showcases the most downloaded apps in the repository. Whether you’re new to F-Droid or looking for something different, Discover provides several ways to explore the growing ecosystem of free and open source Android applications. More useful categories Categories play an important role in helping users browse the repository, so we’ve expanded and refined them significantly, including more specialized categories that make it easier to find specific types of apps, such as VPNs, firewalls, password managers, launches and navigation tools. Here is what you can expect: First, we’ve significantly expanded the category system. Instead of relying on a small number of broad categories, F-Droid now includes many more specialized categories, helping you get closer to the kind of app you want in just a few taps, even before you start searching. Second, to make this expanded category system easier to navigate, we’ve introduced higher-level “meta” categories in the Discover screen. These group related categories together and provide a more approachable entry point for browsing the growing F-Droid ecosystem. Finally, categories now play a larger role throughout the app. Their names and descriptions are used to improve app discovery and help guide users toward relevant free and open source applications. As an example of this effort, we’ve completely reworked the Games category. Rather than grouping all games together, F-Droid 2.0 now distinguishes between 17 different game genres, making it much easier to find the kinds of games you actually enjoy playing. Search that understands what you’re looking for Search has also been significantly improved. In addition to app names, it can now search app descriptions, categories, and translated content. This makes it easier to find apps based on what they do rather than what they’re called. We’ve also made major improvements for users searching in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

Powerful filtering, made approachable Browsing and searching are only part of the story. F-Droid 2.0 also introduces powerful filtering options that help you narrow down large lists of apps to exactly what you’re looking for. Filters can be combined using multiple criteria, such as app category, device compatibility, or anti-features. For example, you can choose to view only Action Games that are compatible with your device and exclude apps that depend on non-free network services. To help users discover these and other advanced capabilities, F-Droid 2.0 introduces onboarding screens throughout the app. Rather than hiding features behind complex settings, the app provides contextual guidance to help both new and experienced users get the most out of F-Droid. Smooth installation experience wherever F-Droid runs For the longest time, the experience of clicking install or update was forced to be second rate by Android. Now, thanks largely to pressure from the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) and anti-trust actions around the world, Android offers all app stores an option for a smoother and more automatic install and update experience than before. F-Droid 2.0 includes groundbreaking work on utilizing these new abilities. This allows F-Droid to use a unified installer for all F-Droid installs, whether built into the OS or you installed it on your device yourself. The unified installer makes use of the new pre-approval API, so that on supported devices the user can confirm right after deciding to install the app, instead of after the app was downloaded. That brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide.