logoalt Hacker News

xingpedtoday at 7:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

I've honestly never understood why F-Droid even still exists. Every time I've tried to use it (as recently as half a year ago) it's still a shitshow and never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app. The other half of the time even when I did get something installed, it would just never understand that an update existed and needed to download and update a given app. It's one of the worst pieces of software I've used in a while, and I can tolerate a good bit of jank from FOSS apps.


Replies

bilkowtoday at 7:56 PM

> never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app. The other half of the time even when I did get something installed, it would just never understand that an update existed and needed to download and update a given app

You probably "just" need to pull down while on the "Latest" or "Updates" tab, to update your repository (it will show a small banner at the top while it's doing that). It's incremental, so it may take a while if it has been some time since you last did it (and auto-updates are disabled).

The way F-Droid works is that it downloads the whole index and then the catalog, version checks, etc, all runs locally, quite similarly to some package repositories actually.

I am not claiming its intuitive, but I think that part works fine once you understand how it works.

show 1 reply
cf100clunktoday at 8:42 PM

Have you tried Neo Store for accessing F-Droid and other repositories? In particular, I use the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid and Guardian Project repos.

show 1 reply
JadeNBtoday at 7:51 PM

> Every time I've tried to use it (as recently as half a year ago) it's still a shitshow and never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app.

Sounds like an accurate recreation of the Play Store experience to me.

show 1 reply