F-Droid 2.0 launches ahead of Google’s upcoming developer verification for sideloaded Android apps

F-Droid 2.0 hit #1 on Hacker News with 1,000+ points. The UI rewrite is nice. The timing is the real story. Google starts enforcing Android developer verification on September 30, 2026. F-Droid shipped 2.0 on September 24. Six days. Let's talk about both. What actually shipped F-Droid 2.0 is a ground-up client rewrite, per the official announcement: Kotlin + Jetpack Compose, Material-aligned. The old Java codebase is gone. Three tabs: Discover, Search, My Apps. Settings and Nearby Swap moved to the top bar. Better search: indexes descriptions, categories and translations, adds CJK support, remembers recent queries. Combinable filters by category, device compatibility and anti-features. Auto-updates on by default, using Android's pre-approval install API. Android 7+ only. Android 6 is dropped. Independent security audit by the Open Technology Fund's Security Lab, after 14 test releases and 1+ year of work. Tor support simplified to proxy settings. The "wipe apps on panic" feature was removed as too costly to maintain. Rollout is gradual over the coming weeks. The HN thread wasn't all praise. Bulk update now needs per-app clicks, which people call a regression. And some alternative clients (Droid-ify, NeoStore) still consume the older index-v1, which is SHA1-signed, while official infrastructure has moved to index-v2. The part that matters: developer verification Google's rule: on certified Android devices, only apps registered to an identity-verified developer can be installed. Sideloads included. Enforcement starts September 30 in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, with global expansion planned for 2027. Three paths exist, as summarized by Pinggy: Full distribution: verify your identity, register your package name with APKs signed by your key. Limited distribution: email-based, capped at 20 devices, for hobbyists and students. Advanced flow: a promised path for experienced users to sideload unregistered apps "with extra safeguards". Details still vague. ADB installs are explicitly carved out. Custom ROMs and users outside the four countries aren't hit yet. Why F-Droid is uniquely exposed Most stores distribute your APK, signed by you. F-Droid builds from source and signs with its own key for the bulk of its catalog. Forum estimates put that at roughly 85% of apps. Verification ties a package name to a developer's signing key. F-Droid's key isn't the developer's key. So for those apps you'd need a coordination mechanism between thousands of independent maintainers and F-Droid that does not exist yet. Reproducible builds are the clean answer, since F-Droid could then ship the developer-signed APK. But reproducible-build coverage is only partial today. What to do if you ship on F-Droid Check your reproducible-build status and push toward it. It's the only path where your key stays on the artifact. Register your package name in Google's system if you're in an affected region, even if you never touch Play. Watch the advanced flow spec. It decides whether power users can still install your app. Keep your applicationId and signing setup stable. Don't change them mid-transition. My take A better client doesn't fix a distribution-model problem. F-Droid 2.0 is a solid engineering win: audited, modern stack, sane UX. But the question for the next twelve months isn't the UI. It's whether an open, build-from-source store can coexist with an OS that wants every APK tied to a verified identity. September 30 is the first real test. Four countries this time, everywhere in 2027. Sources: F-Droid announcement, Pinggy, Android Authority, Hacker News thread.

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register. Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid... [D]evelopers who want their apps broadly distributed outside the official Google Play Store will need to register with Google and verify their identities. Google's Full Distribution option includes paying a one-time $25 fee, handing over a copy of a government-issued ID to verify one's identity, and conforming to Google's terms of service. Google also offers a free Limited Distribution option that doesn't require government ID verification but restricts distribution to 20 authorized devices, while apps from unverified developers can still be installed by users who enable Android's advanced installation flow. The potential death warrant hanging over its head hasn't stopped the F-Droid team from rolling out a bunch of new features for an app it says it intends to keep working on for years to come... The team also credited the EU's many Digital Markets Act decisions against Google for making the installation experience smoother for users. F-Droid can now use a unified installation service for its apps thanks to the availability of a pre-approval API that allows users to approve an installation when they request it, rather than waiting until the app has finished downloading. That, said the F-Droid team, "brings the F-Droid install experience on official Android devices much closer to what the built-in app store can provide." Additionally, F-Droid 2.0 can fetch and install app updates automatically, which it now does by default. All of those changes, however, won't matter much if Google pushes ahead undeterred with its plans to force registration onto non-Play Store developers. F-Droid's announcement on Thursday makes it seem that the team isn't going to go quietly. F-Droid has gone 10 years without a major update, notes Ars Technica — and spent over a year developing F-Droid 2.0: 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... 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. "One of the goals of the rewrite was to lower the barrier for new contributors," F-Droid said in their announcement. "We are excited to begin rolling out F-Droid 2.0 to users over the coming weeks after 14 test releases." (And if you want the 2.0 release right now, it's available on the versions page.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.