This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 09 Apr 2026, Week 15

F-Droid core

Mirrors are an integral part of F-Droid, as a vector for decentralization and user freedom. Besides our main servers, we had about 16 mirrors spread between Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France, Sweden, Taiwan, Singapore and the US. While the spread seems good enough, this planet is larger than 9 countries, no matter how good Internet interconnections are.

This April we’ve added 3 more mirrors from Romania meant for better coverage around the Balkans as a whole. The new servers are activated by default so you don’t need to setup anything. Many thanks go to chroot and Hostico for providing them, but also for being long time supporters of many important FLOSS projects.

I feel that my app installs are slow and my country was not listed above! Sure, networking is a complex subject, let’s also detail a bit what it takes for a mirror to end up in your client.

Given that we are celebrating 16 years of F-Droid means we are thinking in the long term, and we expect the servers that we use or link to, to have the same goals. Any future mirror needs to be hosted on like-minded infrastructure.

What does this mean in practice?

First of all, we are few and we probably don’t live near you, we need you to step up and lead this process for your own benefit first and then for all the others around you.

There are many hosters that might be sympathetic to our (and your) cause, so you’ll start by finding those in your country that might be a good fit. Seek a contact method (e-mail probably), try “tech support” not “accounting”, and ping them with the question, in your native language.

No matter the order of actions, you’ll need to look around and dig more info about them.

Take a look at how they are hosting in general. Is it another CDN (we already have Cloudflare, no need for another instance of it, thanks), baremetal, VPS or an array of Raspberry Pi’s? Can its hosting cope with another Google announcement of locking Android even more? We know our main server fronters cry a bit when news is out…

Who hosts it? Is it a company, institution or individual? How is their public track record? Are they already mirroring other FLOSS projects like the Linux Kernel, Debian, Arch, etc.?

Do they have a privacy policy? Are they supporting privacy by default? Are they not retain any data longer than is necessary?

If a mirror was set, we can start to monitor it to assess its speed and consistency of synchronizing, by first listing it in our mirror-monitor.

And if all these above are true and good, did you test it in your client? Multiple clients? Everything was fine for a few weeks?

Many questions need to be asked, but this ensures the next time you want to get the latest index, update apps or install a new app, everything runs smooth and you spend more time exploring that app and not watching a “snake” slithering slowly across your screen.

Want to start this journey for your country? Join our discussion in the dedicated issue, as we can share some stats and maybe a template for you to use when contacting hosters around you.

Community News

The old Lichess app was replaced by the new one, added last week, and aptly named the same: Lichess. If you’ve installed the app before last week make sure you install the new app and uninstall the old one.

Session F-Droid was updated to 1.33.2 but this might the last version, as the whole project is so under funded that they have entered their last 90 days of service. We’ve told you about their donations plea 3 weeks ago but since they did not reach the needed $1 million (this is the yearly cost of operation) all employees were let go and only maintenance by volunteers will take place until July 8. Read the full announcement here.

CodeDoctor puts on the bunny ears:

Happy Easter to everyone!

As a special treat for the holidays, I am incredibly excited to announce the release of Butterfly 2.5.0!

The update brings many long-awaited features and improvements to the app. From a rebuilt template system to custom keybindings and new touch shortcuts, this release focuses on customization and stability.

Highlights:

📓 Rebuilt Template System
🎨 Shape Styles
⌨️ Custom Keybindings
👆 New Touch Shortcuts
☁️ WebDAV Rewrite
📄 Improved PDF Rendering
🔷 Improved Polygon Workflow
📁 File Management Improvements
🖥️ Better Presentation Mode
💾 Better Export & Data Settings
🔤 Better Arabic Font
📋 Improved Logs

Read more here

@shuvashish76 sharpens the feed:

NewsBlur - News reader was updated to 14.2. We skipped version 14.0 so this update adds even more polish and fixes on top. What’s new? You get a redesigned reading experience, discover related sites, daily briefing, refined dark themes, story list header bar, redesigned preferences and menus, Ask AI and more.

Newly Added Apps

16 apps were newly added

• audav: A cross-platform player for audiobooks stored on NextCloud/WebDAV
• Bag: Bitcoin price tracker & net worth dashboard. No ads, no accounts, privacy-first.
• Banana Split: Split secrets into QR-code shards using Shamir’s Secret Sharing
• BlockAds: Clean Internet: Block ads & trackers system-wide. Firewall, SafeSearch, profiles
• Call Blocker: Block unwanted calls, spam and telemarketing
• Dima Defense: A simple Tower Defense game that was made in LibGDX
• HiddenProtectedWorkProfile: Hidden Profile owner security app
• Kompact: Compress and convert images offline. Batch select, set quality, and export
• LearnTube: A learning-focused YouTube client with progress tracking and notes
• Minesweeper: Beautiful Minesweeper. No ads, no trackers, no permissions.
• Nian: Collection of word games in Swedish
• Quick Ball: A Quick Action Ball that gives fast access to controls —volume, brightness, lock
• Sobuu: Track books reading and organise your readings
• SubSonicSter: Play Hitster card game with your own SubSonic music server
• Tapjacking Bypass: Allow obscured touches for specific apps
• WallApp: WebView wrapper for the TheWallApp wallpaper website

Updated Apps

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 03 Apr 2026, Week 14

F-Droid core

F-Droid Basic was updated to 2.0-alpha6, and we’ve announced it already in a, we hoped, humorous toot back on April first. That ending flew over some heads or maybe people want to hear more good news than “coping jokes”.

Full changelog:

• Faster DB queries (thanks Peter!)
• Support for new categories
• Auto repair corrupted search index
• Make app installs more robust
• Improve Chinese search queries
• Fix name and summary localization in app details
• Fix CJK language search in app lists and My Apps
• Fix RTL presentation of updates
• Fix crash when removing screenshots from disk cache
• Fix crash when deleting repos
• Fix overlay issues in landscape mode on small screens
• Fix themed app icon
• …many unit tests

We’re in the phase of polishing, catching edge-case bugs and waiting for your feedback. Compact bottom-bar for smaller devices? Search button on bottom-bar for that one hand reach-ability? Download speeds display? All considered, mocked, tested on devices, improved. And more to come.

The latest batch of updated strings were pushed to our translation portal so make sure you not only translate but use the app in hand as reference for meaning and context. If you thought your locale was up to date last week, get ready for over 110 new strings!

Want to help, not only to read text? Install F-Droid Basic, if you don’t have it already, navigate to the app details and check “Allow beta updates” in top right three dot menu.

Community News

ArcaneChat and Delta Chat were updated to 2.48.0. Their last week changelog and Fediverse posts were interesting, their latest blog is even nicer. What’s new? Less metadata in certain places, testing native calls via peer-to-peer WebRTC on Android, iOS and Ubuntu Touch, descriptions for groups and channels, audio messages that play in the background, rewritten downloads, multi-path delivery and more.

If you’ve been holding off updating Syncthing-Fork we have two pieces of news for you. First, the original dev continues to collaborate still, we know this was a pain point back then. Second, we’ve just added BasicSync, A simple app for running Syncthing, which just controls Syncthing’s running behaviour as hands off as possible, while the original service hums in the background.

Ente Auth - 2FA Authenticator was updated to 4.4.19 with bug fixes and improvements but Ente Photos - Encrypted photo storage to 1.3.28 got more niceties. Back in February: likes and comments, admin and people management, ZIP downloads, QoL tweaks and more. And now in March: offline galleries, nicer layouts, social feeds, better ML, hidden photos tricks plus lots of fixes.

In more Ente news, the new Ente Locker, An end-to-end encrypted document storage app, was just included, bringing the same polish from photos to documents and beyond. Get a quick look in the introductory post.

EphemeralWorkProfile, Profile owner Android privacy app and ProtectedWorkProfile, Profile owner Android security app, are two new apps from the same developer, that use the Android profile feature to secure isolated spaces on your device, either temporary or more permanent.

Kodi was updated to 21.3 after a three month delay, as its recipe needs a bit of finesse. You can read the changelog here.

Lichess, The one open-source chess game, was just added as a new app, but it’s actually a full rewrite in Flutter that replaces the older lichess. The feature list is impressive and it has UnifiedPush support on top, gg.

Threema Libre was updated to 6.4.0l overhauling the chat overview, protecting the master key with the Android Keystore system and more fixes. Since DeltaChat lobs the metadata topic, looks like Threema has something to say too, talking about paid services vs anonymity, hijacked accounts and more, in their 10 minute post.

@shuvashish76 reads acronyms:

Episteme Reader was updated to 1.0.40-oss adding OPDS catalogue support, DOCX file support and many improvements.

Thore Göbel rotates the USB and tries again:

FMD devs are now publishing developer-signed APKs in their custom repository. The packages on F-Droid are not yet migrated to reproducible builds, but things are shaping up to be soon. Notably, FMD has published detailed documentation and scripts about their experience of using a Nitrokey HSM. Hopefully, this helps other Android developers to sign their apps with hardware keys! For more details, see the announcement blog post.

Newly Added Apps

33 more apps were newly added

• Brogue CE Android: A classic dungeon crawling roguelike
• Chip Defense Copper: A tower defense game with a microprocessor theme
• Collect the Cookies!: Collect cookies in this fun idle-ish game
• CSV Editor: View and edit CSV files on your device
• De Fide: Offline Catholic app for prayer, Scripture, novenas, and the Rosary
• deutsia radio: Privacy-focused radio player supporting clearnet, Tor, and I2P networks
• DroidStress: Simple CPU Stress test tool for Android
• FastTimes: Simple, private, open-source intermittent fasting tracker
• FirTube: FirTube — browser based on Android WebView for watching YouTube
• FloFla Cards: FloFla Cards – Passive learning with your phone! 🎓📱
• GAMA: A specialized utility to manage and switch GPU rendering APIs via Shizuku
• GlyphPort: Port Nothing® Glyph Compositions between phones
• Impostor MX: Classic multiplayer party game, now digital and open source
• Jyutping - Cantonese Keyboard: Easy-to-use Cantonese input method with pronunciation lookup and dictionary
• Kefir Control: Track milk kefir fermentation times
• KeinPlan: Alternative client for static DSB resources
• LibreFit: Workout tracker with a rich dataset and images
• Miniter: Video editor built for simple tasks
• Music: A basic M3Y music player app
• NightDream: Clock, screensaver & radio with dynamic brightness & custom layouts
• Notes: A basic note-taking app
• PaperKnife+: Privacy-first PDF utility: merge, split, rotate, and protect
• Pokébase: Browse Pokémon and TCG cards with search, filtering, and offline caching
• RowMate: Track your workouts on your FTMS rowing machine with real-time data
• Sidestep: Intercept URLs, remove tracking, and redirect to privacy-friendly frontends
• SilentShare: Share personal information with others visually in-person
• Smart Edge: Sidebar & Gestures: A highly customizable side panel inspired by OriginOS
• SoundPod: A minimalist music streaming app
• SpaceBeam: Kaleidoscope Camera Fun with Shaders for live visual performances
• Study Tracker: Simple and clean study progress tracker
• USB Descriptor Explorer: Inspect USB devices with full descriptor and HID details
• VolumeScroll: Scroll anywhere using your volume buttons
• Word Tracer: A crossword-like puzzle game

Updated Apps

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

The F-Droid website is now also available in the Croatian language.

Thanks for everyone that contributed! While the website is translated, there are still some other components that are currently in progress. Those interested in contributing to F-Droid’s contribution efforts, are encouraged to contribute via Hosted Weblate.

If you are publishing an Android ROM, you can add some extra pre-installed repositories to the F-Droid app which otherwise only includes the official F-Droid repository.

If you wanted to add the repository of the Guardian Project for example, you could add the following JSON file to one of the following locations of your choice:

• /system_ext/etc/fdroid/additional_repos.json
• /product/etc/fdroid/additional_repos.json
• /vendor/etc/fdroid/additional_repos.json

[
  {
    "name": "Guardian Project",
    "address": "https://guardianproject.info/fdroid/repo",
    "description": "The official app repository of The Guardian Project. Applications in this repository are official binaries build by the original application developers and signed by the same key as the APKs that are released in the Google Play store.",
    "certificate": "308205d8308203c0020900a397b4da7ecda034300d06092a864886f70d01010505003081ad310b30090603550406130255533111300f06035504080c084e657720596f726b3111300f06035504070c084e657720596f726b31143012060355040b0c0b4644726f6964205265706f31193017060355040a0c10477561726469616e2050726f6a656374311d301b06035504030c14677561726469616e70726f6a6563742e696e666f3128302606092a864886f70d0109011619726f6f7440677561726469616e70726f6a6563742e696e666f301e170d3134303632363139333931385a170d3431313131303139333931385a3081ad310b30090603550406130255533111300f06035504080c084e657720596f726b3111300f06035504070c084e657720596f726b31143012060355040b0c0b4644726f6964205265706f31193017060355040a0c10477561726469616e2050726f6a656374311d301b06035504030c14677561726469616e70726f6a6563742e696e666f3128302606092a864886f70d0109011619726f6f7440677561726469616e70726f6a6563742e696e666f30820222300d06092a864886f70d01010105000382020f003082020a0282020100b3cd79121b9b883843be3c4482e320809106b0a23755f1dd3c7f46f7d315d7bb2e943486d61fc7c811b9294dcc6b5baac4340f8db2b0d5e14749e7f35e1fc211fdbc1071b38b4753db201c314811bef885bd8921ad86facd6cc3b8f74d30a0b6e2e6e576f906e9581ef23d9c03e926e06d1f033f28bd1e21cfa6a0e3ff5c9d8246cf108d82b488b9fdd55d7de7ebb6a7f64b19e0d6b2ab1380a6f9d42361770d1956701a7f80e2de568acd0bb4527324b1e0973e89595d91c8cc102d9248525ae092e2c9b69f7414f724195b81427f28b1d3d09a51acfe354387915fd9521e8c890c125fc41a12bf34d2a1b304067ab7251e0e9ef41833ce109e76963b0b256395b16b886bca21b831f1408f836146019e7908829e716e72b81006610a2af08301de5d067c9e114a1e5759db8a6be6a3cc2806bcfe6fafd41b5bc9ddddb3dc33d6f605b1ca7d8a9e0ecdd6390d38906649e68a90a717bea80fa220170eea0c86fc78a7e10dac7b74b8e62045a3ecca54e035281fdc9fe5920a855fde3c0be522e3aef0c087524f13d973dff3768158b01a5800a060c06b451ec98d627dd052eda804d0556f60dbc490d94e6e9dea62ffcafb5beffbd9fc38fb2f0d7050004fe56b4dda0a27bc47554e1e0a7d764e17622e71f83a475db286bc7862deee1327e2028955d978272ea76bf0b88e70a18621aba59ff0c5993ef5f0e5d6b6b98e68b70203010001300d06092a864886f70d0101050500038202010079c79c8ef408a20d243d8bd8249fb9a48350dc19663b5e0fce67a8dbcb7de296c5ae7bbf72e98a2020fb78f2db29b54b0e24b181aa1c1d333cc0303685d6120b03216a913f96b96eb838f9bff125306ae3120af838c9fc07ebb5100125436bd24ec6d994d0bff5d065221871f8410daf536766757239bf594e61c5432c9817281b985263bada8381292e543a49814061ae11c92a316e7dc100327b59e3da90302c5ada68c6a50201bda1fcce800b53f381059665dbabeeb0b50eb22b2d7d2d9b0aa7488ca70e67ac6c518adb8e78454a466501e89d81a45bf1ebc350896f2c3ae4b6679ecfbf9d32960d4f5b493125c7876ef36158562371193f600bc511000a67bdb7c664d018f99d9e589868d103d7e0994f166b2ba18ff7e67d8c4da749e44dfae1d930ae5397083a51675c409049dfb626a96246c0015ca696e94ebb767a20147834bf78b07fece3f0872b057c1c519ff882501995237d8206b0b3832f78753ebd8dcbd1d3d9f5ba733538113af6b407d960ec4353c50eb38ab29888238da843cd404ed8f4952f59e4bbc0035fc77a54846a9d419179c46af1b4a3b7fc98e4d312aaa29b9b7d79e739703dc0fa41c7280d5587709277ffa11c3620f5fba985b82c238ba19b17ebd027af9424be0941719919f620dd3bb3c3f11638363708aa11f858e153cf3a69bce69978b90e4a273836100aa1e617ba455cd00426847f",
    "enabled": true
  }
]

Important warning

The old method of adding repositories using an XML file will not work in F-Droid 2.0. We suggest to ship both, the JSON and the XML file as soon as possible until F-Droid 2.0 has stabilized.

App specific repositories

If you want to add repositories only to a specific app instead of all F-Droid clients, you can add a JSON file to a location including the app’s package name:

• /system_ext/etc/[packageName]/additional_repos.json
• /product/etc/[packageName]/additional_repos.json
• /vendor/etc/[packageName]/additional_repos.json

The official variants of the F-Droid app have these package names that could replace [packageName] in the paths above:

• org.fdroid.fdroid
• org.fdroid.basic

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 27 Mar 2026, Week 13

Community News

ArcaneChat was updated to 2.46.0 and Delta Chat to 2.47.0 and their changelogs almost match. The team is fairly active in the Fediverse and wants to make people realize that while end-to-end encryption for your messages is nice, the metadata surrounding them might reveal a lot more than one wants. Their latest infographic covers one app from BigTech, but you can compare that with your current solution and strive to limit metadata as much as possible.

Fennec F-Droid was updated to 149.0.0 and you can read the changelog here. Did you update yet? Then you might have seen the strange notification that now pops-up, about UnifiedPush. It appears it’s part of some code reorganization that’s not yet done. We are tracking this issue here and you can read how to hide the notification so it’s no longer annoying. NOTE: While the word “push” has big corporation connotations, that’s just the result of how it was abused. UnifiedPush is an open standard protocol, and we’ve been covering it since its inception. You can read all about that in our older post.

In more UnifiedPush news, FMD and FMD edge were updated to 0.14.2. If you’re using them with your favorite UnifiedPush distributor maybe double-check if they are registered ok, FMD is working towards updating this code and some distributors, like Conversations (and forks), might not work until ready.

Also Prism, Privacy-first UnifiedPush distributor with an optional self-hosted server, was just included offering an alternative in this diverse ecosystem.

Saracroche was updated to 2.7.0 and celebrates one year of existence. You can read (in French or use Fennec offline translation) about the road behind and the one ahead.

SchildiChat Next was updated to 0.11.0-ex_26_3_3 after a five month hiatus while reproducibility issues were fixed.

WebLibre: The Privacy-Focused Browser was updated to 0.10.0 with a huge changelog. If you want to try an alternative to the Fennec UI, but based on the same engine, you now have more reasons.

@linsui counts to potato:

We’ve just added two new apps in the Calculator category to a total of 40+2. While we have so many calculator apps, do all of them calculate? Let’s try a simple test: 10000000000.1 - 10000000000. Simple. The answer should be 0.1, right? (Don’t cheat, don’t open some app, wait and read!) Yet some apps don’t think so. The new added SoulCalc, Schulrechner and Calculator You told me 0.1000003815. CalcYou told me 0, the new Calculator M3 said the same but it’s fixed now. CuteCalc, Neumorphic Calculator and Mint Calculator told me 0.10000038146972656. Qalculate! told me 100⋅10^−3. PariDroid told me 0.099999999999999999999999999979805160823. And yetCalc crashes on start and the working version also thinks that the answer is 0.10000038146972656. Glad to see that most calculators in F-Droid know how to calculate, but looks like this is not a very easy task to achieve.

@shuvashish76 dusts an old second factor:

FreeOTP+ was updated to 3.2 after two years. It’s now updated to Material Design 3 and got some security fixes. Other apps did not stand still during this time, our “Password & 2FA” category has a lot of nice apps.

Removed Apps

2 apps were removed

• DesktopLabel: Custom desktop label widgets
• Pi Locker: Lockscreen

Newly Added Apps

16 more apps were newly added

• BlueGate: Control bluegate BLE gate controller
• Calculator M3: Clean, private calculator with zero data collection. Offline. No ads.
• Cashiro: Offline expense tracker for bank SMS and PDF statements with optional AI chat
• DropCount: A recreation of the classic Drop7 puzzle game
• End of Updates Checker: Check until when your phone gets updates
• GifBoard: Search and share GIFs directly from your keyboard
• Golden Ticket: Lottery simulation game - explore strategies without spending money
• Iremi Breathing App: Breathing exercises to reduce anxiety
• iTrack workout tracker: Workout tracker for managing your fitness routines
• MetaPurge: Locally strip sensitive EXIF/metadata from your photos
• Nontrinsic: Where nonsense lives on
• Numerus: Train oral comprehension of numbers in foreign languages with real speech clips
• OceanNex for DigitalOcean: Manage Your DigitalOcean Infrastructure
• podium (Podcasts): A modern, open-source Podcast app
• SoulCalc: Notepad-style calculator with variables, line references, multi-line support
• TapDucky: Run DuckyScript over USB HID. Import, schedule, and manage payloads (root)

Updated Apps

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 13 Mar 2026, Week 11

F-Droid core

The countdown to September lock-down continues. Did you do your part? Did you contact your local representative yet? What did they answer?

Did you install F-Droid on all you family’s members and close friends devices? Why not? Have them try a good FLOSS app today, we don’t have millions of apps but we host good apps that offer the transparency users deserve.

Let’s show them that one does not need to be an advanced users to get good, privacy respecting apps, and when everyone installs F-Droid we are normalizing the freedom of users to decide that for themselves.

Want to be more daring? Install or update to the latest F-Droid Basic version 2.0-alpha4. It brings:

• Tweak category layouts to separate groups of categories (Thanks Peter)
• Show banner alerting users to how Google developer verification threatens F-Droid (Thanks Peter)
• Evaluate and translate more strings
• DNS cache feature 2.0 refactor (Thanks Matthew Bogner)
• Update color definitions for light and dark themes (Thanks proletarius101)
• Consistent chip layout throughout (Thanks Peter)
• Show us in TV launchers (Feedback welcomed!)
• Fix bugs with keyboard navigation
• Show Discover screen faster and animate items
• Keep filter icon visible in app lists
• Allow filtering app lists by anti-features
• …and more

And by the time you read this, 2.0-alpha5 might be live too…

Want a good “starter” app in the world of FLOSS apps for Android? Have NewPipe, it was updated to 0.28.4 and, besides the usual fixes and improvements, it added a start dialogue to inform users about the Google plan to lock-down Android soon.

Community News

In stats news, @kitswas announces that all-time stat badges are available thanks to @BURG3R5. Now you can get badges like Downloads (all time) from the badge builder.

And our own @grote is researching integrating download stats in F-Droid Client (hint: Basic 2.0-alpha already includes stats) and they’ve quickly put up a website that shows downloads in total and per category for the last year. Note that the numbers only cover our own servers and not our dozen or so mirrors, since these are used at random for each download, you might need to multiply the numbers.

AndrOBD was updated to V2.7.4 after some months of development. Does the changelog sound nice? Oh, new contributors have arrived…

sing-box was updated to 1.13.2 with a refactored UI and many improvements.

Removed Apps

3 apps were removed

• NClientV2: An unofficial NHentai Client (See new apps below)
• Smile SS14: Smile from Space Stastion 14 as a ANeko skin
• WhatsDown: Fast encrypted chats for the family (Metadata needs to be updated to make it clear it’s a fork of ArcaneChat)

Newly Added Apps

38 apps were newly added

• Africa Quiz: Quiz game testing your knowledge of African capital cities
• Atmo Engine: Replicate the dynamic ‘Atmosphere’ unlock transition effect from Nothing OS
• Be nice: Your friendly launcher
• Bluetooth QR & Barcode to PC: Enables sending QR/Barcodes to a Bluetooth Device (e.g PC) without any Software
• CaptureCap: Record Audio and/or Screen
• Classic Tic Tac Toe: Fun with emoji naughts and crosses
• Episteme Reader: A document reader for PDF, EPUB, and MOBI
• FileFlow: Organize files automatically
• Gendie - Grammatical Gender Trainer: Never forget the gender of nouns with Gendie - the grammatical gender trainer
• Image Compressor: Compress JPEG/PNG images using mozjpeg or jpegli offline
• Internet Helper for Gadgetbridge: Companion for Gadgetbridge, to allow for controlled Internet access
• KyuubiMask - Privacy First: Privacy-focused notification masking for screen sharing and presentations
• Launcher314: Just a simple one screen launcher people can use
• LibreFind: Discover and replace proprietary apps with FOSS alternatives
• NClientV3: A configurable manga client, a fork of NClientV2
• NerdCalci: Calculator for nerds with variables, syntax highlighting, and file sessions
• Network Scanner: Fast, privacy-focused network scanner to discover devices on your local network
• NexNode for Linode Cloud: Manage Your Linode Cloud with NexNode
• NFC Archiver: Store and restore files across multiple NFC tags
• Octo8: Check current Splatoon 3 map schedules
• OnePlus ARB Checker: Check Anti-Rollback (ARB) index for OnePlus devices to ensure safe updates
• Punch-hole Download Progress: Xposed module showing download progress around the camera cutout
• QuandoInTV: Don’t miss the broadcast of your favorite TV programs
• RepoStore: Discover, install, and update apps directly from GitHub releases
• RiPlay: Multiplatform Music Player
• ruNNNpe bridge: Automatic bridge from NPE RUNN to Health Connect
• ScoreHub - Game Score Tracker: Track your board game scores easily
• Simple Audio Converter: A simple audio converter
• SimpleHIIT: Customisable HIIT timer with animated exercises
• Smoking Tracker: Track your smoking and see daily, weekly, monthly and yearly statistics
• Stutter: Speed-reading app that shows one word at a time with adjustable timing
• Taiga Mobile Nova: Unofficial client for Taiga.io project management
• Trails Hito: A simple and lightweight application for managing and exploring trails
• UniThen: Course check-in for ZHS without the bloaty UniNow app
• warecache: Smart Inventory Management companion
• WiFi Password Manager: Simple app using Shizuku or root access to manage WiFi passwords
• Wikisource Reader: Access public domain and freely licensed works from the Wikisource project
• Überböse: Control Bose SoundTouch speakers & Spotify auth

Downgraded Apps

1 app was downgraded

• Amarok was downgraded from 0.10.0 to 0.9.3 so the dev fixes a thing or two.

Updated Apps

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This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 27 Feb 2026, Week 9

F-Droid core

Banners aside, we’ve been working a lot behind the scenes on our website. Several functional and textual changes were on our TODO for years, just waiting for the right people to sit down and type the right words in their editors.

Textual changes? We’ve rewritten our About, added Licenses, refined the Inclusion Policy, rechecked Contribute, upgraded Repomaker and detailed Donate. We also reordered top items, removed “Forum” entry (still in “About”), and more, to better describe our mission, what qualities F-Droid brings to the Android ecosystem, how to reach us, how to help and how to get help. If everything is not yet translated into your language please lend a hand in Weblate as the volume was rather high in a short period of time.

Functional changes? Our website tooling needs specialized knowledge, and while we got contributors to help along the way, as mentioned in passed TWIFs, it needs someone to dig, test, rip out, test, rewrite, test some more, in a focused way to improve it. In the last months we got this help, switched to using index-v2 repository data and fixed some old pain points. With this modern format we can now show per app version changelogs, show Anti-Features details, so you know why these were added (already available in Client) and we fixed some missing permissions listings.

Flicky was updated to 4.2.3 and Neo Store to 1.2.4 adding the usual UX polish and bug fixes. The apps are also joining F-Droid in the initiative to inform their users via an in-app banner about the campaign to keep Android open.

In terminal land, the CLI client fdroidcl also added a banner in their Readme.

Community News

Conversations and Quicksy were updated to 2.19.11+free and then, a day later, to 2.19.12+free. The first update improved invitations flow, touched the MUC UX, fixed sharing IRC bridged channels, improved connection behavior with VPNs and Airplane mode and fixed four reported security issues. As the users got the update, some were no longer being able to login when using older server versions, eg. prosody 0.11 or ejabberd 23.01, as they can’t handle the hardened security setup. If you’ve updated to 2.19.12 and you still can’t connect, you can try to toggle off TLSv1.3 and/or Channel Binding in Settings > Security. But more importantly, please contact your server admin and ask them to upgrade, as they are 3 years or more behind security fixes. Also give them this link so they know to do it faster before they are cut off from federation next month.

Ente Photos - Encrypted photo storage was updated to 1.3.15 and 1.3.16. If you are part of the 0.003% app users who run it on x86 or x86_64 Android devices be aware that 1.3.15 is the last version for you.

Godot Engine 4 had an update this week, but we had to disable it. A library mix-up made all 4.6.1 packages be marked installable on all architectures, meaning that the highest versionCode package would be used for all. For arm64 users, the vast majority, there will be no issue, but for the rest the app would just crash. We are working on a recipe fix.

Until then, you can peruse the release notes and maybe think about attending the GodotCon Amsterdam convention on 23rd, 24th of April.

RHVoice - a free and open source speech synthesize was updated to 1.18.1 after one year of intense work. The app has now Material 3 theming and edge-to-edge support, on top of a lot of fixes.

Tor VPN Beta, Tor-powered with per-app routing, access unblocking & network-level privacy, was just added. F-Droid’s history goes a long way in regards with collaborations with the Tor Project, via Guardian Project. We used to have the Guardian Project repo added by default in Client because their apps were useful and always just around the corner to be added in F-Droid. One such beloved app is Orbot, the proxy and VPN client that routes all connections through the Tor network. Fun fact: the in-Client “Use Tor” button was added expecting that Orbot will come to F-Droid “real soon now”, and other apps thought the same.

Unfortunately that did not happen, creating a chicken-and-egg issue for users that needed to jump through extra hoops to find Orbot and use the Client, making Tor usage an “expert” level flow. Over the years, in order to allow any user of any tech experience be able to easily access Tor, Orbot (under the Guardian Project development) grew to emphasis the VPN mode and the Tor Project created the newly added app which removes the proxy mode altogether.

A guide on how to use the app can be found here.

F-Droid Client 2.0 is in development, and we are redesigning the proxy experience to simplify it.

Newly Added Apps

3 more apps were newly added

• CajuScan: Record invoices in the Cashew app by scanning the QR code on Portuguese invoices
• Chord Progression Helper: A music app to write chord progressions, add simple drum beats and more
• EstudiaTAI: Practice tests for the Spanish AGE IT Assistant exams

Updated Apps

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

Nominations are now open for this year’s appointments to the F-Droid Board of Directors! We are looking to select up to four volunteer directors to serve for two years each.

You may nominate yourself or someone else (with their permission). Please send nominations by email to board-nominations@f-droid.org (one email per nomination) and make sure that the nominee is copied in.

We will confirm receipt of each nomination, and we may also ask nominees additional questions by email to help us make a selection. To ensure consideration, please send nominations no later than the 16th of March, Anywhere on Earth (AoE).

Who should be nominated?

We seek to be an enthusiastic, collaborative and diverse board that can support the F-Droid community as effectively as possible. We welcome nominations of anyone committed to furthering the freedoms of computer users, particularly with regard to mobile devices. Nominees don’t have to have experience in software development or have served on governing boards in the past: we seek candidates from all backgrounds.

What should I include in a nomination?

So that we can best evaluate your nomination, we would like to see a description of why you think the candidate would make an excellent board member. Consider including some or all of the following:

• links to relevant social media profiles and personal websites

• examples of previous contributions to F-Droid or other Free and Open Source Software

• particular skills or qualifications that could be useful

How will the new directors be selected?

The nominations will be discussed by the current Board of Directors in a private meeting. The current directors will vote on each nominee. Existing directors are permitted to run for an additional term, but voting is weighted in favour of new candidates. For more information on the process, see our statutes.

What is expected of directors?

The main responsibility of directors is to participate in discussions with other directors via email and to communicate with F-Droid contributors and users (for instance, in threads on GitLab or the F-Droid Forum). Directors are also required to respond promptly if a vote is called. In addition, the Board of Directors holds a monthly video conference which lasts one hour and is open to the general public.

In total, directors generally spend between one and three hours a week on activities relating to their position on the Board of Directors.

English is the working language of the Board of Directors, so an adequate English ability is required.

We would be more than happy to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that everyone is able to contribute, so please don’t hesitate to get in contact if you have any questions about these expectations.

Directors must follow the F-Droid Code of Conduct and exemplify high standards in the F-Droid community.

When will the new appointments be announced?

Our intention is to decide on the appointments as early as the 19th of March and announce the selected candidates as soon as possible afterwards. We look forward to receiving your nominations!

What is the current membership of the Board of Directors?

• Vishal Bakhai
• Neil Brown
• Sebastian Crane
• Marc Prud’hommeaux
• Peter Serwylo
• Hans-Christoph Steiner
• John Sullivan

The terms of the following members are ending this year:

• Sebastian Crane
• Peter Serwylo
• Hans-Christoph Steiner
• John Sullivan

As we wrote about back in September in F-Droid and Google’s Developer Registration Decree, Google plans to enforce mandatory developer registration as a requirement for building and distributing Android applications worldwide. Android, currently an open platform where anyone can develop and distribute applications freely, is to become a locked-down platform, requiring that developers everywhere register centrally with Google in order to be able to distribute their software. This applies regardless of whether your software is distributed commercially on a competitive app store like the Samsung Galaxy Store, or through a non-commercial community app repository like F-Droid, or even by offering your app as a direct download from a web page. In all these cases, installing or launching any application on an Android Certified device (which constitutes over 95% of all Android-compatible devices outside of China) will phone home to Google to verify that the developer and the application has been approved.

After an initial public outcry, Google rushed to assure developers that “sideloading is not going away”. This, as we pointed out in What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading, is simply untrue. Sideloading, their pejorative term for the direct and unintermediated installation of software of your choosing on the device that you own, is indeed going away if they follow through on their threat. Furthermore, future app store competitors, be they commercial or non-profit, will forever be disadvantaged by their developers being required to sign up with Google, bound to their (voluminous, non-negotiable, and ever-changing) terms and conditions, pay a fee, upload government-issued identification, and register each and every one of their applications with Google.

But didn’t Google back down on Developer Verification?

There was a brief sigh of relief in November when Google offered vague assurances in a blog post that they were going to design some “advanced flow” that might permit “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified”. Some commenters went so far as to claim victory and assert that Google had backed down from the program altogether. Such triumphalism was premature and uninformed. We have since learned that no such “advanced flow” will be made available prior to the September lock-down. They purported to be “gathering early feedback on the design of this feature”, but this is also untrue: no such feedback has been sought from anyone outside of Google.

Google’s official and unambiguous stance remains, according to their developer landing page, that:

Starting in September 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices.

Google has refused repeated requests for concrete information about what form their so-called “advanced flow” will take, but it is reasonable to predict that if and when it is ever made available at some future point after the lock-down takes effect, it will be maximally obscure and high-friction. Such uncertainty makes it impossible to assess the viability of any “advanced flow” as a work-around for preserving software freedom, and so we must disregard it until it has been demonstrated and vetted by the community.

Silence is consent; Resistance is not futile

According to their official timeline, Google intends to open their developer registration console in March. This is the first phase of lock-down, where developers are to be offered the dubious privilege of paying Google so they can surrender their government identification, register all their applications, and become forever locked into Google’s terms and conditions for app distribution.

We unequivocally advise against signing up for this program, now or ever.

But mere inaction is insufficient to offer meaningful resistance to the program. Individual developers must also become advocates for software freedom: through their own projects, through blog posts, through social media, and by contacting their regional regulators. It is only through developer complicity that Google’s lock-down of Android can succeed.

F-Droid stands in solidarity as a signatory to the open letter published today at keepandroidopen.org/open-letter. We join with such champions of free software and free speech as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Software Freedom Conservancy, and dozens of other organizations around the world in repudiating Google’s overreach.

We implore Google to listen to the overwhelming opposition to this program and change course. The Android Developer Verification program is a grievous breach of trust with the free and open-source community that helped propel Android to the dominant position it holds today in the mobile computing world. There is still time to regain trust as a faithful steward of Android, and to work together with the community to seek sound and measured approaches to improving the security of the platform for users everywhere. But that time, as can be watched on the countdown at keepandroidopen.org, is quickly running out.

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Friday, 20 Feb 2026, Week 8

F-Droid core

During our talks with F-Droid users at FOSDEM26 we were baffled to learn most were relieved that Google has canceled their plans to lock-down Android.

Why baffled? Because no such thing actually happened, the plans announced last August are still scheduled to take place. We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth, and having journalists just copy/paste Google posts serves no one.

But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issue… As time marches on people were left with the impression that everything was done, fixed, Google “wasn’t evil” after all, this time, yay!

While we all have bad memories of “banners” as the dreaded ad delivery medium of the Internet, after FOSDEM we decided that we have to raise the issue back and have everyone, who cares about Android as an open platform, informed that we are running out of time until Google becomes the gate-keeper of all users devices.

Hence, the website and starting today our clients, with the updates of F-Droid and F-Droid Basic, feature a banner that reminds everyone how little time we have and how to voice their concerns to whatever local authority is able to understand the dangers of this path Android is led to.

We are not alone in our fight, IzzyOnDroid added a banner too, more F-Droid clients will add the warning banner soon and other app downloaders, like Obtainium, already have an in-app warning dialogue.

Regarding F-Droid Basic rewrite, development continues with a new release 2.0-alpha3:

• Updated Translations
• Export installed apps list as CSV
• Add install history feature
• Add mirror chooser setting
• Add prevent screenshots setting
• Show tool-tips for all app bar buttons
• Create 3-dot overflow menu for My Apps for less frequently used actions
• Persist sort order of My Apps
• Adapt strings according to Material Design 3 guidelines
• Apply string suggestions (Thanks Lucas)
• Fix missing icon bug in pre-approval dialog

Note that if you are already using F-Droid Basic version 1.23.x, you won’t receive this update automatically. You need to navigate to the app inside F-Droid and toggle “Allow beta updates” in top right three dot menu.

In apps news, we’re slowly getting back on track with post Debian upgrade fixes (if your app still uses Java 17 is there a chance you can upgrade to 21?) and post FOSDEM delays. Every app is important to us, yet actions like the Google one above waste the time we could have put to better use in Gitlab.

Community News

Buses was updated to 1.10 after a two year hiatus.

Conversations and Quicksy were updated to 2.19.10+free improving on cleaning up after banned users, a better QR workflow and better tablet rotation support. These are nice, but another change raises our interest, “Play Store flavor: Stop using Google library and interface directly with Google Play Service via IPC”. Sounds interesting for your app too? Is this a path to having one single version for both F-Droid and Play that is fully FLOSS? We don’t know yet, but we salute any trick that removes another proprietary dependency from the code. If curious feel free to take a look at the commit.

Dolphin Emulator was updated to 2512. We missed one version in between so the changelogs are huge, luckily the devs publish highly detailed posts about updates. So we’ll start with “Release 2509” (about 40 mins to read), we side-track with “Starlight Spotlight: A Hospital Wii in a New Light” (for about 50 mins), we continue to the current release in “Release 2512” (40 more minutes) and we finish with “Rise of the Triforce” delving in history for more than one hour.

Image Toolbox was updated to 3.6.1 adding many fixes and… some AI tools. Were you expecting such helpers? Will you use them?

Luanti was updated to 5.15.1 adding some welcomed fixes. If your game world started flickering after the last update make sure to update.

Nextcloud apps are getting an update almost every week, like Nextcloud was updated to 33.0.0, Nextcloud Cookbook to 0.27.0, Nextcloud Dev to 20260219, Nextcloud Notes to 33.0.0 and Nextcloud Talk was updated to 23.0.0.

But are you following the server side too? Nextcloud Hub 26 Winter was just released adding a plethora of features. If you want to read about them, see the 30 minutes post here or watch the one hour long video presentation from the team here.

ProtonVPN - Secure and Free VPN was updated to 5.15.70.0 adding more control to auto-connects, countries and cities. Also all connections are handled now by WireGuard and Stealth protocols as the older OpenVPN was removed making the app almost 40% smaller.

Offi was updated to 14.0 with a bit of code polish. Unfortunately for Android 7 users, the app now needs Android 8 or later.

QUIK SMS was updated to 4.3.4 with many fixes. But Vishal praised the duplicate remover, the default auto de-duplication function and found that the bug that made deleted messages reappear is fixed.

SimpleEmail was updated to 1.5.4 after a 2 year pause. It’s just a fixes release, updating translations and making the app compatible with Android 12 and later versions.

Removed Apps

5 apps were removed

• Chord Shift: Shift plain text notes
• OpenAthena™ for Android: OpenAthena™ lets common drones spot precise locations
• Tibetan Keyboard: Keyboard for Tibetan script
• Tibetan Pad: Read Tibetan script
• Tomdroid: Note taker

Newly Added Apps

1 app was newly added

• NeoDB You: A native Android app for NeoDB designed with Material 3/You

Updated Apps

Thank you for reading this week’s TWIF 🙂

Please subscribe to the RSS feed in your favourite RSS application to be updated of new TWIFs when they come up.

You are welcome to join the TWIF forum thread. If you have any news from the community, post it there, maybe it will be featured next week 😉

To help support F-Droid, please check out the donation page and contribute what you can.

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Monday, 09 Feb 2026, Week 7

F-Droid core

On 31 January & 1 February 2026 in Brussels, Belgium, part of the F-Droid Team and Board were at FOSDEM 2026. We had a booth to present our project but also had flyers, stickers, camera privacy widgets, mousepads, keychains and t-shirts if visitors were inclined to get some swag.

We talked with so many people we can’t recall all the chats, but all were great and insightful. All those that were already users had one phrase to tell us: “Thank you for existing!” which is a rather specific way of saying something, but makes sense given the current Android context. We pressed with questions, asked about complaints and issues, yet most said “None”, people were happy to see updates faster but beyond that having the app just work and out of the way is what everyone wanted.

The new Basic alpha was showcased, some were happy to see that apps with issues are finally made visible and that the app looks more “modern”, yet we did not see in person the same push-back focused against the new look that folks voice online.

Was FOSDEM fun? Very much, yet it was exhausting as we were focused to talk with everyone at our booth, have great presentations, help out in the “FOSS on Mobile” room and still get a bit of time to visit other booths to interact with other projects. Finally meeting in the real world the people behind online monikers was a real experience in itself.

Presentations? Yes, our team was part of a few:

• Marc Prud’hommeaux had “Fear and Loathing in the App Stores”
• F-Droid Team had “The Funding Gap in FOSS: What We Learned and How to Close It”
• Aysha from CalyxOS and our own Torsten Grote had “Open-source HSM-based signing for AOSP-based projects with limited resources: Lessons from CalyxOS signing redesign”

Our friends from IzzyOnDroid had two interesting ones:

• Izzy with “Reproducible Builds for Android Apps”
• Sylvia with “IzzyOnDroid Download Statistics”

And from our friends around F-Droid:

• Daniel Gultsch (Conversations and Ltt.rs) and Simon Gougeon (UnifiedPush developer) had “UnifiedPush - Push notifications. Decentralized and Open Source”
• Holger Krekel (DeltaChat) with “Autocrypt 2: Post-Quantum-Cryptography and Reliable Deletion (“Forward-Secrecy”)”
• Holger Krekel and missytake (DeltaChat) with “Multi-relay chat messaging & cryptographic identities with Delta Chat and Chatmail relays”
• Lucas Lasota (FSFE) and more, with “Interoperability regulation in the EU: Opening iOS and Android for Free Software”

Did we miss your favorite one? We surely did, feel free to ping us!

Community News

FMD was updated to 0.14.0 and we also added FMD edge. This “cutting edge” version of FMD receives updates faster, more often, and slightly earlier than FMD.

Fossify Calendar was updated to 1.10.2 fixing a crash in 1.10.1, so make sure this update is not stuck in the Updates section.

We’re sad to report that Harmony Music’s development has stopped last year. We have many players in F-Droid, maybe you can try to switch to another app that you find as good.

LocalSend is a great app, yet as software is getting more complex bugs have a higher chance to appear. Latest one affecting this app even has a CVE level entry, explained here. The issue lies in the “Share via Link” code, and since the fixed version is not yet released, please avoid using this function or receiving files this way.

@shuvashish76 shows us a flashcard:

Ownership of open source flashcard app Anki transferred to for-profit AnkiHub. The original developer posted the reason on their forum here, AnkiHub added a FAQ here and the dev posted again to dismiss the initial lack of trust here. There’s also a long discussion on Hacker News.

Removed Apps

1 app was removed

• Menu Generator: Applications for picking meals according to the season

Newly Added Apps

1 more app was newly added

• Cat a shooter 😼: Fly in the space by the cat 😼, and shoots off from enemies 🛸

Updated Apps