// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
F-Droid 2.0
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.