In the world of Android, you get a rare privilege in mobile operating systems—installing custom app stores. The most popular of which is F-Droid. F-Droid is a free and open source app store with lots of great apps you can download and also one of the last holdout alternatives to the Play Store. If you use an alternate Android ROM, F-Droid maybe one of your primary ways to obtain apps.

How F-Droid Works

One of the best things F-Droid is it provides an discoverability for apps you have probably never heard of. An app I’ve used quite a bit in the last year is Stocks Widget by Prem Nirmal. It’s a simple stock portfolio tracker, gets very frequent updates, and it’s an app I never would have known about were it not for F-Droid. This also leads to new apps the Mastodon client Moshidon or the podcasting app AntennaPod, both of which are fantastic, as well as apps like OpenPods that much too saucy for the Play Store.

The other benefit of this is F-Droid is also the home to many other popular apps like Tuta Mail/Calendar or Proton VPN. They also provide a framework for other providers to make their own F-Droid repositories like the password manager Bitwarden and the IronFox browser. This way, you’re guaranteed to get the latest updates for those apps.

But I have a lot of reservations and concerns, some external, and genuine concern for the current processes within.

Everything is Outdated!

First, let’s install F-Droid, you go to the website, tap the download button, tap past the warnings of Google and your Android OS, and now we get the first problem. The default build of F-Droid is not able to update apps automatically because they target compatibility with phones running older versions of Android. While I am sympathetic to people with older devices, either because they live in a developing nation or for budgetary reasons, if a smaller project other than F-Droid did the same thing, I’d probably stop using it because they aren’t keeping their own application up to date.

This makes the F-Droid installation process even more convoluted where people have turned to forks of the F-Droid client like Neo Store, but this introduces another party into the works just as you are trusting F-Droid and it hammers F-Droid’s servers. There is a mitigation for this where you use an alternate F-Droid client by the F-Droid team called F-Droid Basic that targets modern Android.

While it’s commendable that F-Droid provides the means for people to host their own repositories, F-Droid’s own store is actually in dire straits. Many of the applications on F-Droid are out of date. For example, Stock Widget’s page makes the claim that the app was last updated weeks ago. However, visiting the project’s GitHub repository shows the app is getting frequent updates every week. This is far from the only app where popular apps like Tuta Mail and Proton Pass don’t reflect the same versions that exist on GitHub or the Play Store. There’s conjecture about this being the build servers, but truthfully, I have no clue but this appears to be a problem unique to F-Droid. No other service I know has distributed an outdated version of an executable that prompted you to get updates after you installed it other than F-Droid. Not keeping apps up to date is just unacceptable; not keeping your own store updated doubly so. It’s disrespectful to developers when you can’t deploy the apps they made and instead force everyone to wait for some review process which ends up going through most of the time because it was open source anyway.

F-Droid Repeats Linux’s Problems

Let’s get into the real reason I wanted to make this video—F-Droid repeats the same problems many Linux distributions do, except perhaps worse than many of them. That sounds harsh, but there are multiple instances of F-Droid acting as an arbiter for what apps people choose to use.

What’s An “Antifeature?”

The first example of this is what qualifies as an anti-feature? In case of the mapping app Organic Maps, arguably the best free and open source mapping app. If you didn’t know, Organic Maps is an offline mapping application, so you download your mapping data from OpenStreetMap prior to your journey. The perks of this is it often has more up to date footpath data than Google Maps and can operate under limited connectivity.

However, Organic Maps is branded with a “non-free” flag on F-Droid because the mapping data is “proprietary” binaries, even though OpenStreetMap is publicly published, editable, and freely distributed information. If someone at F-Droid cared so much, why even list the application if you don’t like this? Clearly someone wanted this to be here, but this creates problems for Organic Maps, who have gone as far to argue for avoiding F-Droid altogether. The side effects of F-Droid over focusing on licensing means these apps get dragged through the mud being marked as having anti-features when in reality F-Droid scares people out of downloading these apps or hides them in the name of licensing fears.

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Similarly, if you use apps like FairEmail or Breezy Weather, you will find options like OATH login or Accuweather disabled respectively. This is because the F-Droid developers don’t like people exercising their freedom to use non-free services. Moreover, Mastodon is shamed for daring to use a server to discover an instance to join. It says “fully reliant on” this server, but this is bold-faced lie. You can join a Mastodon instance without assistance of Mastodon’s server.

For the record, I believe an app store reserves the right to platform an app or not. But when that same app store will platform you and shame you for not following their lifestyle? Why does F-Droid list permissions at the bottom, but the “anti-features” are more important to see?

Religion Is NSFW?

This is far from the only example, because the other problem is a more recent example where all Bible and Quran apps were marked as “content that should not be publicized or visible everywhere.” F-Droid, if it shouldn’t be publicized or visible, take the app down, why are we going through this? But what follows this warning is the most asinine thing I’ve ever seen in an app store. “Promotes porn and violent contents.” Violent contents for recounting war, I can understand why someone would come to that conclusion. I can also understand this flag being written the way it is because we can’t blanket use English-centric terms like “NSFW.” What I cannot understand is labeling the Quran and Bible as promoting porn. I’m sorry two of the traditionally most Puritanical religions on the planet Earth promote porn??

That’s not even the worse of it. The worse part was they removed this tag, but only after fascists on Twitter complained and started citing the Bible and Quran out of context deep in the GitLab issues. This isn’t even mentioning the Play Store, the Apple App Store, and the majority of Linux distributions don’t stoop to the low of labeling Bible or Quran apps as NSFW. So congratulations F-Droid, you angered believers of two world religions, only changed course to cave to fascist weirdos online, and believe you have the right to decide what apps are visible by default to others.

What Can Change F-Droid?

Unfortunately, I don’t think I’m first to bring up these issues. The worst part about this situation is there are apps that are stuck on F-Droid and will not be made available through some other means. Big examples like the podcast app AntennaPod or the text to speech accessibility tool RHVoice. You cannot download these apps from another source except the Play Store. It’s very similar to popular applications prominently advertised for F-Droid. I don’t it to just be F-Droid; I want it in other stores beyond F-Droid.

If the way F-Droid go about doing it is hostile to the developer by not keeping it up to date and anti-user in the name of some FOSS purity, this seems like plain old gatekeeping to me. F-Droid talks big game about the injustice of Google locking down their ecosystem, while they enforce arbitrary rules across apps in their store all the same. The bottom line, developers ought to be the ones with the means of distribution and how, not delivered with a filter or modified like F-Droid does.

Also, I know somebody will bring up scraping APK files from GitHub and GitLab. Unfortunately, while this is slightly better, I don’t think this is the answer. App stores are necessary because they provide a better user experience, but not when they act as arbiters to what can/cannot be included. The goal of app stores should be to publish quality apps first and foremost, not pushing a nerd philosophy.

While F-Droid isn’t the only alternative app store on Android, they are just the one with the largest app volume. We just don’t want to make a singular store the face of all of this and unfortunately, F-Droid is just branded as such by the 1% that have Android phones and probably tell people to use NixOS when they aren’t advocating for nerdy Android stuff. The good news is we are starting to see the beginnings of that with stores like Accrescent, featuring better security controls and doesn’t have open source stipulations. The downside is having more app stores similar to Accrescent with the same focuses or like F-Droid, they need to make their project more sustainable, but that’s a story for another time.

Track Listing

Updates

  • November 27th, 2025: Due to repeat issues about F-Droid builds failing, Stocks Widget has removed all F-Droid support. You may still obtain it via the Play Store and a debug version from GitHub. As of time of writing, the F-Droid page deceives its users by flagging the app “This app’s source code is no longer available,” despite the fact the app was outdated on F-Droid for years, fully available on GitHub, and licensed under the GPL.