// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
F-Droid's New App Shows it Isn't Going Anywhere
Since 2010, F-Droid has been the go-to place for downloading free and open source apps for Android. Its client app is the one people interact with the most, and it has received many upgrades over the years.
But now it's time for a massive rewrite that has emerged from more than a year of development and numerous test releases.
Kotlin replaces the original Java codebase, and the interface has been rebuilt on Jetpack Compose. The result is an app that follows Material Design throughout, so that it looks and behaves like it belongs on a modern Android device.
The app's bottom bar now has three sections: Discover for browsing, Search for queries and quick access to categories, and My Apps for tracking installed apps, updates, and issues.
You will also find that the Settings menu has moved to the top-right, being placed alongside the new Repositories menu.
Coming back to the Discover page, it has been configured to highlight newly added apps, recently updated ones, and the most downloaded ones in the repository. Related categories are grouped together, making it easier to browse the full catalog without getting lost in a long list.
Search now handles categories, app descriptions, and translated content in addition to app names, and results for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean queries have improved. Your search history is also saved for future queries.
Filtering has been reworked too; results can be narrowed by anti-features, device compatibility, and category all at once.
This is how the old F-Droid app looks in comparison.
The app now checks for updates in the background by default, removing the need for the pull-to-refresh gesture that used to trigger repository scans. Of course the manual check is still available from the My Apps page once you go into the three-dot menu.