A faster heart for F-Droid

https://f-droid.org/2025/12/30/a-faster-heart-for-f-droid.html

by kasabali • 7 months ago

536 215 7 months ago

kasabali2• 7 months ago

Context: "F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44884709)

NoiseBert69• 7 months ago

So.. what kind of hardware did they buy?

IshKebab2• 7 months ago

Yeah kind of conspicuously absent! They said

The previous server was 12 year old hardware

which is pretty mad. You can buy a second hand system with tons of ram and a 16-core Ryzen for like $400. 12-year old hardware is only marginally faster than a RPi 5.

cvwright• 7 months ago

Unfortunately you can’t even get the RAM for $400 anymore.

DaSHacka• 7 months ago

12-year old hardware is only marginally faster than a RPi 5.

A Dell R620 is over 12 years old and WAY faster than a RPi 5 though...

Sure, it'll be way less power efficient, but I'd definitely trust it to serve more concurrent users than a RPi.

phantom784• 7 months ago

Plus the fact that it's been running for 5 years. Does that mean they bought 7 year old hardware back then? Or is that just when it was last restarted?

lucb1e2• 7 months ago

12-year old hardware is only marginally faster than a RPi 5

My 14yo laptop-used-as-server disagrees. Also keep in mind that CPU speeds barely improved between about 2012 and 2017, and 2025 is again a lull https://www.cpubenchmark.net/year-on-year.html

I'm also factoring in the ability to use battery bypass in phones I buy now because they are so powerful, I might want to use them as free noiseless server in the future. You can do a heck of a lot on phone hardware nowadays, paying next to nothing for power and no additional cost on your existing internet connection. A RPi 5 is that same ballpark

valgaze• 7 months ago

Hmm:

“F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access.”

IshKebab2• 7 months ago

"F-Droid is not hosted in a data centre with proper procedures, access controls, and people whose jobs are on the line. Instead it's in some guy's bedroom."

Not reassuring.

ugh123• 7 months ago

The 'cloud' has come full circle

TomatoCo2• 7 months ago

In some respects, having your entire reputation on the line matters just as much. And sure, someone might have a server cage in their residence, or maybe they run their own small business and it's there. But the vagueness is troubling, I agree.

A picture of the "living conditions" for the server would go a long way.

gpm3• 7 months ago

Eh...

The set of people who can maliciously modify it is the people who run f-droid, instead of the cloud provider and the people who run f-droid.

It'd be nice if we didn't have to trust the people who run f-droid, but given we do I see an argument that it's better for them to run the hardware so we only have to trust them and not someone else as well.

PaulKeeble2• 7 months ago

It could just be a colo, there are still plenty of data centres around the globe that will sell you a space in a shared rack with a certain power density per U of space. The list of people who can access that shared locked rack is likely a known quantity with most such organisations and I know in the past we had some details of the people who were responsible for it

pwndByDeath• 7 months ago

I think there are countless examples of worse failures by organisations that meet your criteria for far more valuable assets than some free apps.

a3w• 7 months ago

Depends on the thread model, which one is worse.

State actor? Gets into data centre, or has to break into a privately owned apartment.

Criminal/3rd party state intelligence service? Could get into both, at a risk or with blackmail, threats, or violence.

Dumb accidents? Well, all buildings can burn or have an power outage.

skiing_crawling2• 7 months ago

I never questioned or thought twice about F-Droid's trustworthiness until I read that. It makes it sound like a very amateurish operation.

I had passively assumed something like this would be a Cloud VM + DB + buckets. The "hardware upgrade" they are talking about would have been a couple clicks to change the VM type, a total nothingburger. Now I can only imagine a janky setup in some random (to me) guy's closet.

In any case, I'm more curious to know exactly what kind hardware is required for F-Droid, they didn't mention any specifics about CPU, Memory, Storage etc.

AndrewDucker2• 7 months ago

For a single server why would you use cloud services rather than go the self-owned route?

lrvick10• 7 months ago

It makes it sound like a very amateurish operation.

Wait until you find out how every major Linux distributions and software that powers the internet is maintained. It is all a wildly under-funded shit show, and yet we do it anyway because letting the corpos run it all is even worse.

kube-system9• 7 months ago

Yikes. They don't need a "special arrangement" for those requirements. This is the bare minimum at many professionally run colocation data centers. There is not a security requirement that can't be met by a data center -- being secure to customer requirements is a critical part of their business.

Maybe the person who wrote that is only familiar with web hosting services or colo-by-the-rack-unit type services where remote-hands services are more commonly relied on. But they don't need to use these services. They can easily get a locked cabinet (or even just a 1/4 cabinet) only they could access.

fruitworks2• 7 months ago

A super duper secure locked cabinet acessible only to them or anyone with a bolt cutter.

You want to host servers on your own hardare? Uh yikes. Let's unpack this. As a certified AWS Kubernetes professional time & money waster, I can say with authority that this goes against professional standards (?) and is therefore not a good look. Furthermore, I can confirm that this isn't it chief.

mcsniff• 7 months ago

Ugh. This 100% shows how janky and unmaintained their setup is.

All the hand waving and excuses around global supply chains, quotes, etc...it took pretty long for them to acquire commodity hardware and shove it in a special someone's basement and they're trying to make it seem like a good thing?

F-Droid is often discussed in the GrapheneOS community, the concerns around centralization and signing are valid.

I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look.

lrvick10• 7 months ago

As someone that has run many volunteer open source communities and projects for more than 2 decades, I totally get how big "small" wins like this are.

The internet is run on binaries compiled in servers in random basements and you should be thankful for those basements because the corpos are never going to actually help fund any of it.

pydry• 7 months ago

It's a shame mozilla wont step up to fund it. They've spunked way more money on way dumber things.

lukan• 7 months ago

"I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look."

I would agree, that it is not a good look for this society, to lament so much about the big evil corporations and invest so little in the free alternatives.

fruitworks2• 7 months ago

You can't just host servers in your own basement! You need to pay out the ass to host servers in some big company's basement!

viraptor• 7 months ago

shove it in a special someone's basement

They didn't say what conditions it's held in. You're just adding FUD, please stop. It could be under the bed, it could be in a professional server room of the company ran by the mentioned contributor.

lrvick10• 7 months ago

100%. Just as an example I have several racks at home, business fiber, battery backup, and a propane generator as a last resort. Also 4th amendment protections so no one gets access without me knowing about it. I host a lot of things at home and trust it more than any DC.

xandrius• 7 months ago

"Nothing is ever good enough" (tm)

orthecreedence• 7 months ago

If I were running a volunteer project, I would be dumping thousands a month into top-tier hosting across multiple datacenters around the world with global failover.

cyberax2• 7 months ago

I read it a bit differently: you don't need to be a mega-corp with millions of servers to actually make a difference for the better. It really doesn't take much!

Also, even 12-year-old hardware is wicked fast.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

The issue isn’t the hardware, it’s the fact that it’s hosted somewhere private in conditions they wont name under the control of a single member. Typically colo providers are used for this.

magguzu• 7 months ago

Graphene is a great product but their incessant mud slinging at any service that isn't theirs is tiresome at best.

Some of their points are valid but way too often they're unable to accept that different services aren't always trying to solve the same problem.

ekjhgkejhgk2• 7 months ago

their incessant mud slinging at any service that isn't theirs is tiresome at best.

100%. But you know, sadly I've noticed that non-experts are impressed by elitism. So you don't have to be good, you just have to shit on others, and passerbys will interpret that as being very competent.

Which is super ironic, from a project which about privacy but only supports hardware built by the biggest surveillance company.

gnufx2• 7 months ago

commodity hardware

Apart from the "someone's basement", as objected to in this thread, it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason.

wtallis8• 7 months ago

it also doesn't say they acquired "commodity hardware"; I took it to suggest the opposite, presumably for good reason.

This seems entirely like wishful thinking. They were using a 12 year old server that was increasingly unfit for the day-to-day task of building Android applications. It doesn't seem like they were in a position to acquire and deploy any exotic hardware (except to the extent that really old hardware can be considered exotic and no longer a commodity). I'd be surprised if the new server is anything other than off the shelf x86 hardware, and if we're lucky then maybe they know how to do something useful with a TPM or other hardware root of trust to secure the OS they're running on this server and protect the keys they're signing builds with.

troyvit• 7 months ago

It's like ya'll are so eager to crap on a thing that you don't even read tfa.

this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services.

So you are assuming it's a rando's basement when they never said anything like that.

If their way of doing business is so offensive either don't use them, disrupt them or pitch in and help.

I understand this is a volunteer effort, but it's not a good look.

What does make a "good look" for a volunteer project?

wtallis8• 7 months ago

What does make a "good look" for a volunteer project?

It's an open-source project. It should be... open. Not mysterious or secretive about overdue replacements of critical infrastructure.

well_ackshually3• 7 months ago

this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services.

This is effectively a rando's basement. It doesn't matter that they've been a contributor or whatever. Individuals change, relationships sour. Securely hosting how ? By locking the front door ? By being a random tech company in the midwest ? Or by having proper access control ?

As a little reminder, F-Droid has _all_ the signing keys on its build server. Compromising that is somewhere between "oh that's awful" and "stop the world". These builds go out as automatic updates too. So uh, yeah, I'd like it if it was hosted by someone serious and not my buddy joe who's a sysadmin don't worry

ekjhgkejhgk2• 7 months ago

F-Droid is often discussed in the GrapheneOS community, the concerns around centralization and signing are valid.

Clearly the GrapheneOS community is clueless then.

You can host F-Droid yourself, which is the opposite of centralized. If the GrapheneOS community actually is concerned about centralization they can host an instance as well.

Futhermore, each author signs their own software, which again is the opposite of centralized. One authority signing everything would be centralized.

So F-Droid is decentralized in authorship and distribution. Google store is only decentralized in authorship.

websiteapi• 7 months ago

Another important part of this story is where the server lives and how it is managed. F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff.
The previous server was 12 year old hardware and had been running for about five years. In infrastructure terms, that is a lifetime. It served F-Droid well, but it was reaching the point where speed and maintenance overhead were becoming a daily burden.

lol. if they're gonna use gitlab just use a proper setup - bigco is already in the critical path...

PaulKeeble2• 7 months ago

Modern machines go up to really mental levels of performance when you think about it and for a lot of small scale things like F droid I doubt it takes a lot of hardware to actually host it. A lot of its going to be static files so a basic web server could put through 100s of thousands of requests and even on a modest machine saturate 10 gbps which I suspect is enough for what they do.

This just reads to me like they have racked a box in a colo with a known person running the shared rack rather than someone’s basement but who really knows they aren't exactly handing out details.

wtallis8• 7 months ago

This isn't about a server for hosting the website or package repo, it's about the server building all the packages.

JuniperMesos2• 7 months ago

Which is itself kind of suspicious - why can't they say "yeah we pay for Colo in such-and-such region" if that is what they are doing? Why should that be a secret?

JimBlackwood• 7 months ago

While I get their setup is amateurish, it's also a good reminder of how simple setups can be.

Saying this on HN, of course.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access.

I can’t be the only one who read this and had flashbacks to projects that fell apart because one person had the physical server in their basement or a rack at their workplace and it became a sticking point when an argument arose.

I know self-hosting is held as a point of pride by many, but in my experience you’re still better off putting lower cost hardware in a cheap colo with the contract going to the business entity which has defined ownership and procedures. Sending it over to a single member to put somewhere puts a lot of control into that one person’s domain.

I hope for the best for this team and I’m leaning toward believing that this person really is trusted and capable, but I would strongly recommend against these arrangements in any form in general.

EDIT: F-Droid received a $400,000 grant from a single source this year ( https://f-droid.org/2025/02/05/f-droid-awarded-otf-grant.htm... ) so now I’m even more confused about how they decided to hand this server to a single team member to host in unspoken conditions instead of paying basic colocation expenses.

silisili2• 7 months ago

Yup. But the same can happen in shared hosting/colo/aws just as easily if only one person controls the keys to the kingdom. I know of at least a handful of open source projects that had to essentially start over because the leader went AWOL or a big fight happened.

That said, I still think that hosting a server in a member's house is a terrible decision for a project.

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

if only one person controls the keys to the kingdom

True, which is why I said the important parts need to be held by the legal entity representing the organization. If one person tries to hold it hostage, it becomes a matter of demonstrating that person doesn’t legally have access any more.

I’ve also seen projects fall apart because they forgot to transfer some key element into the legal entity. A common one is the domain name, which might have been registered by one person and then just never transferred over. Nobody notices until that person has a falling out and starts holding the domain name hostage.

olyjohn2• 7 months ago

It doesn't say it's in someone's house. Maybe the guy runs a business doing this.

At least they know where it is. They can go knock on the door.

eighthave2• 7 months ago

Lots of projects with good security track records host key servers in a "member's house". That said, the F-Droid buildserver is not hosted in anyone's house.

lrvick10• 7 months ago

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup. Donations like this are rare and it may be all they get for a decade.

Personally I would feel better about round robin across multiple maintainer-home-hosted machines.

pilif• 7 months ago

400k would last me 13 years for a rack, power and 10Gbit/s bandwidth at my colo place (Switzerland, traditionally high prices)

Aurornis9• 7 months ago

400K would go -fast- if they stuck to a traditional colo setup.

I don’t know where you’re pricing coloration, but I could host a single server indefinitely from the interest alone on $400K at the (very nice) data centers I’ve used.

Collocation is not that expensive. I’m not understanding how you think $400K would disappear “fast” unless you think it’s thousands of dollars per month?

kube-system9• 7 months ago

For a server? The going rate for a 1/4 cabinet is $300-500/month.

shrubble• 7 months ago

A full rack, 10 gigabits bandwidth and 1920W of power is available for as little as $800/month: https://1530swift.com/colocation.php

Of course you have to buy the switches and servers…

silisili2• 7 months ago

For reference, in the US at least, there was/is a company called Joes Data Center in KC who would colo a 1U for $30 or $40 a month. I'd used them for years before not needing it anymore, so not some fly by night company(despite the name).

At that rate, that would buy you nearly 1000 years of hosting.

arjie2• 7 months ago

I, personally, have a cabinet in a colo. With $400k, I can host it at that datacentre with the income from risk-free return never exercising the capital with 10 GigE, 3 kW of power. If I can do it, they can do it.

Modern computers are super efficient. A 9755 has 128 cores and you can get it for cheap. If you've been doing this for a while you'd have gotten the RAM for cheap too.

If I, a normie, can have terabytes of RAM and hundreds of cores in a colo, I'm pretty sure they can unless they have some specific requests.

And dude, I'm in the Bay Area. Think about that. I'm in one of the highest cost localities and I can do this. I bet there are Colorado or Washington DCs that are even cheaper.

jeltz2• 7 months ago

If 100 years is fast, yes. You can get pretty sweet colo for 4k per year. I know cheaper places too.

1f60c• 7 months ago

a $400,000 grant

IDK if they could bag this kind of grant every year, but isn't this the scale where cloud hosting starts to make sense?

0x1ch2• 7 months ago

You have two options. Colo if you still want physical access to your devices, or cloud, where you get access to nothing beyond some online portals.

stefan_2• 7 months ago

So that they can pay 100x more expenses for.. no gain? They would pay an arm just for traffic.

well_ackshually3• 7 months ago

400k could get you 10 Dell Poweredges with a 128 core CPU, 256GB of RAM and multiple terabytes of storage _multiple times_. 400k easily covers two of these machines, and colocation space is about 2k per year.

Cloud hosting only makes sense at a very, very small scale, or absurdly large ones.

briffle• 7 months ago

The OSU Open Source Lab gives machines to groups in their datacenter: https://osuosl.org/services/hosting/

It has hosted quite a few famous services.

petcat• 7 months ago

Which famous services?

I doubt OSU is going to host F-Droid. It doesn't even sound like F-Droid would want them to host it.

eulgro• 7 months ago

It's just a build server no? If that's the case it's not the end of the world.

Or does it also serve the APKs?

lytedev• 7 months ago

depending on how you view it, the build server _does_ serve the APKs, right?

moelf• 7 months ago

We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services.

Not clear if "contributor" is a person or an entity. The "hosting services" part make it sound more like a company rather than a natural person.

autoexec2• 7 months ago

I know self-hosting is held as a point of pride by many, but in my experience you’re still better off putting lower cost hardware in a cheap colo with the contract going to the business entity which has defined ownership and procedures. Sending it over to a single member to put somewhere puts a lot of control into that one person’s domain.

If they really want to run it out of a computer in their living room they should at least keep a couple servers on standby at different locations. Trusting a single person to manage the whole thing is fragile, but trusting a few people with boxes that are kept up to date seems pretty safe. What are the odds they'd all die together? Paying a colo or cloud provider is probably better if you care about more 9s of uptime, but do they really need it?

vachina2• 7 months ago

There is nothing wrong with hosting prod at home. A free and open source project needs to be as sustainable and low maintenance as possible. Better to have a service up and running than down when the funds run out.

ycombinatrix• 7 months ago

Is colocation not considered to be "self-hosting" in the cloud era?

flemhans• 7 months ago

In these times, even running your own software on a provisioned VM is considered self-hosting sometimes.

xorcist• 7 months ago

one person had the physical server in their basement

Unless you have even the faintest idea about how F-Droid does it, please stop spreading FUD. All the article says is that it is not a normal contract but a special arrangement where one or a select few have physical access. It could be in a locked basement, it could be in a sealed off cage in a data center, it could be a private research area at a university. We don't know.

A special arrangement with an academic institution providing data center services wouldn't be at all surprising, that has been the case for many large open source projects since long before the term was invented, including Linux, Debian and GNU itself.

Many of these are run by professionals with high standards. The Debian project has done pioneering work with reproducible builds, for example, something the F-Droid project is also very much involved with. Those things are what creates trust in the project.

arcfour4• 7 months ago

A special arrangement with an academic institution providing data center services

They would have said this if it were the case. Why would they make it sound so sketchy if it wasn't otherwise? There is no "FUD", you don't know better than anyone else would either, so you don't get to make that argument and then speculate yourself.

crote• 7 months ago

It could be in a locked basement, it could be in a sealed off cage in a data center, it could be a private research area at a university. We don't know.

Yes, and that is exactly the problem. They didn't write "a large university/company/government institute which wishes to remains anonymous has graciously donated space in their ISOwhatever certified in-house hosting facility", they wrote "physically held by a long time contributor".

It is written as if it is just Some Guy's Mom's Basement, with a guarantee of Trust Me Bro. If it is indeed hosted in a professional environment, why don't they say so?

People are assuming the worst because it isn't their first rodeo, and they've seen it go wrong time and time again. If F-Droid wants to be taken seriously Just Trust Us isn't good enough - especially with their main selling point being "you can't trust Google"!

prmoustache2• 7 months ago

Ultimately hosting is not the most critical part as long as backups are stored in places other members of the projects have access to (and one copy could be in their own home, I don't think the f-droid repos have grown to be that big they can't be hosted on commodity NAS).

What is usually more critical is who has the credentials for the domain management.

eighthave2• 7 months ago

There are two key concepts at play here: "least authority" and "infrastructure as code". The buildserver host is sensitive security-wise, but easy to set up an instance. We have multiple instances running, and spin up new ones from time to time. For production infrastructure, there should only be enough people with access to it as are needed to maintain it. No more. If a sysadmin goes rogue, we can always just spin up a new instance elsewhere with a new maintainer.

j45• 7 months ago

Physically held is _very_ different than only one person having access. It doesn't seem to imply it's hosted in a basement at all.

There is zero reason that server in the basement can't be a mirrored node to one or more vps'.

To extend your point, it's probably far better to have something cloud agnostic so it can flip between horribly compromised or attacked hosts.

Basement servers on Fibre, with a bit of knowledge and power backup can be just as reliable as most for one simple and over looked reason, they're reasonably obscure and don't fall under the attention large hosts receive. They absolutely have other issues to get rid of, which can be.

Self-hosting isn't about a "point of pride". Time reveals the value of self-sufficiency, not in every case to the absolute, but being able to.

Self-hosting at home is often similar skills to hosting a server in a datacenter, whether it's your own hardware co-located, rented server, or a managed server.

ZiiS• 7 months ago

Let's focus on how they have done so much with such simple hardware, rather then comparing them to companies that do so little with so much more.

anticorporate• 7 months ago

It's frankly embarrassing how many of the comments on this thread are some version of looking at the XKCD "dependency" meme and deciding the best course of action is to throw spitballs at the maintainers of the critical project holding everything else up.

wtallis8• 7 months ago

At the very least, it's reasonable to expect the maintainers of such a project to be open about their situation when it's that precarious. Why wouldn't you take every opportunity to let your users and downstream projects know that the dependency you're providing is operating with no redundancy and barely enough resources to carry on when things aren't breaking? Why wouldn't they want to share with a highly technical audience any details about how their infrastructure operates?

tcfhgj2• 7 months ago

when it's that precarious

assumptions

charcircuit3• 7 months ago

F Droid is no where near being a critical project holding Android up. The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical. Being open source doesn't make you immune from criticism for not following industry standards or being called out for poor security.

lucb1e2• 7 months ago

If you have nothing to install on your device, what's the point of being able to? For me, f-droid is a cornerstone in the android ecosystem. I could source apks elsewhere but it would be much more of a hassle and not necessarily have automatic updates. iOS would become a lot more attractive to me if Android didn't have the ecosystem that's centered around the open apps that you can find on f-droid

drnick15• 7 months ago

The Play Store, and the Play Services themselves are much more critical.

Critical for serving malware and spyware to the masses, yes. GrapheneOS is based on Android and is far better than a Googled Android variant precisely because it is free of Google junk and OEM crapware.

stefan_2• 7 months ago

I think both of those POVs are wrong. The whole thing about F-Droid is that they have worked hard on not being a central point of trust and failure. The apps in their store are all in a repo (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata) and they are reproducibly built from source. You could replicate it with not too much effort, and clients just need to add the new repository.

whalesalad• 7 months ago

Absolutely zero details on the old or new server.

j1elo• 7 months ago

I wonder if anyone knows about Droid-ify. Whether it it a safe option, or better to stay away of it?

It showed up one day while I searched about why F-Droid was always so extremely slow to update and download... then trying Droid-ify, that was never a problem any more, it clearly had much better connectivity (or simply less users?)

kasabali2• 7 months ago

it's a different client using same servers. fdroid official client is just super buggy.

debugnik• 7 months ago

not hosted in just any data center [...] a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services

This is ambiguous, it could mean either a contributor's rack in a colocation centre or their home lab in their basement. I'd like to think they meant the former, but I can't deny I understood the latter in my first read.

Also, no details on the hardware?

basilgohar• 7 months ago

I think all the criticism of what F-Droid is doing here (or perceived as doing) reflects more on the ones criticising than the ones being criticised.

How many things went upside down and all the "right" things were done (corporate governance, cloud native deployment, automation, etc.). The truth is none of these processes are actually going to make things more secure, and many projects went belly up despite following these kinds of recommendations.

That being said, I am grateful to F-Droid fighting the good fight. They are providing an invaluable service and I, for one, am even more grateful that they are doing it as uncompromisingly as possible (well into discomfort) according to their principles.

dugite-code• 7 months ago

Not to mention this is a build server, its uptime isn't actually all that critical, assuming they then mirror the artifacts out from there.

Not to mention it also simplifies the security of controlling signing keys significantly.

vachina2• 7 months ago

Exactly, if you run out of money, processes meant jackshit.

alexnewman• 7 months ago

i'm glad we have a wing that's against gab app store. Can we have one that's for them for balance?

anthk2• 7 months ago

Good. But I wish PostmarketOS supported more devices. On battery, tons of kernel patches could be set per device plus a config package in order to achieve the best settings. On software and security...you will find more malware in Play Store than the repos from PmOS/Alpine. I know it's not a 100% libre (FSF) system, but that's a much greater step towards freedom than Android, where you don't even own your device.

drnick15• 7 months ago

The issue with Linux-based phones is and remains apps. Waydroid works pretty well, but since you need to rely on it so much, you are better off using Graphene or Lineage in the first place.

anthk2• 7 months ago

But Android it's a clusterfuck. Look Lemuroid, a Retroarch based emulator with a nice GUI. With the new SAF related permissions you can't make the emulator work any more.

And that being a libre package from F-Droid. And I noticed several other bugs. Tyr for instance (an Yggmail service which bundles Yggdrasil) doesn't have an armv7a version. Tyr could be really useful with DeltaChat because you could talk with any relative without depending on 3rd party mail services. And because of arbitrary limitations, compiling a 32 bit binary it's damn difficult for maintainers, yet I could compile yggmail for Go under Termux without no issues.

Thus, that's why I prefer PostMarketOS, software would just run once it's installed and for sure I wouldn't need to set an SDK weighting several GB's.

ilaksh• 7 months ago

Is it possible to add some kind of hardware detection to the build process of a project submitted and inspect the details?

Gelob• 7 months ago

so uhhh what are the specs of said server?

SuperNinKenDo• 7 months ago

Christ, comment sections like this make me never want to do anything that might gain widespread adoption, ever.

Brought to you by the helpful folks who managed to bully WinAmp into retreating from open source. Very productive.

wolpoli• 7 months ago

A lot of people here are used to working for companies with a larger infrastructure budget.

vjay15• 7 months ago

I wish they could give more clarity on whether its hosted in a professional server or someone's bedroom, because just saying that "it's held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services" is not very reassuring.

Abishek_Muthian• 7 months ago

I don't understand why governments haven't started to fund F-Droid, almost all govt. apps are open-source.

Countries which fear they could be cut off from the duopoly mobile ecosystem should be forcing android manufacturers to bundle in F-Droid; For the amount of nonsense regulations they force phone manufacturers to adhere to, bundling F-Droid wouldn't be that hard.

Google won't be happy, but anti-trust regulations would take care of it.

edent• 7 months ago

What did your local politician say when you wrote to them and suggested it?

(I've worked with several politicians. You'd be surprised what a well timed letter or meeting can achieve.)

idoubtit• 7 months ago

Not much...

I wrote a few times to my local MPs ("député", as we call them in France). I usually got a response, though I suspect it was written by their secretary with no other consequence. In one case (related to privacy against surveillance), they raised a question in the congress, which had just a symbolic impact.

It may be different in other countries. In France, Parliament is de-facto a marginal power against a strong executive power. Even the legal terms are symptomatic of this situation: the government submits a "project of law" while MPs submit a "proposal of law" (which, for members of the governing party, is almost always written by the government then endorsed by some loyal MP).

worldsavior2• 7 months ago

Because it's not their responsibility. Why they should care about these kind of stuff? Don't drop everything on governments.

A project like F-Droid is dumb to begin with where they're the one to build the apps.

MYEUHD• 7 months ago

A project like F-Droid is dumb to begin with where they're the one to build the apps.

I heartily disagree. Linux distributions also build the packages themselves, and that adds a layer of trust.

It ensures that everything in the fdroid repo is free software, and can be self-built.

Johnny555• 7 months ago

Does anyone know what the server is? I don't see it on their site.

I'm curious why supply chain issues got in the way and why they couldn't just configure a Dell Poweredge and get delivery in a couple weeks.

I'm assuming they have some special requirements that weren't met by an off-the-shelf server, so I'm just curious what those requirements are.

utopiah• 7 months ago

I think there are quite some misconceptions about F-Droid in the comments :

- you can be your own F-Droid server

In fact it's a basic static HTTP(S) server that is generated with the list of .apk and meta-data so it rely doesn't require much.

I think what is concerning to people is that the most popular INSTANCE of F-Droid, the one that is by default when one downloads the F-Droid CLIENT, is "centralized" but again that's a misconception. It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself. Adding another repository in the F-Droid parlance is just a simple option of changing or adding a URL to more instances.

That being said if anybody here would like to volunteer to be provider a fallback to the build system to that popular instance, I imagine the F-Droid team would welcome that with open arms.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 7 months ago

"It's only popular, it's not really central to F-Droid itself."

I've used F-Droid for years and I've never used the client ("the F-Droid app")

For me the value of F-Droid is as a list of open-source software with (a) pointers to source code and (b) sample binaries

The goal of F-Droid could be to enable Android users to read, edit and compile the software they choose to run on their "phones"

But F-Droid promotes their own app ("the client") so maybe the project's goal is something more like an "app store"

herewulf3• 7 months ago

Likely they are trying to make said list of open-source software easily accessible. The vast majority of users are incapable of compiling their own software. Probably it's better (for users' freedom, privacy, and a healthy Android FOSS ecosystem) to have these users obtaining software through an F-Droid "app store" than through Google Play.

The goal that you suggest is interesting. It reminds me of Guix, where one can obtain binaries or one can build the entirety of packages oneself. All from the same system.

Perhaps you could share how you are currently building software from source and/or F-Droid?

1vuio0pswjnm72• 7 months ago

Is F-Droid intended for "the vast majority of users"

Is popularity, e.g., user majorities versus user minorities, always equivalent to "importance". For web traffic and associated data collection, ad services, etc., popularity is obviously important. But what if one is not focused on such things

Consider the statement "It's only popular, it's not really central for F-Droid itself"

ptx2• 7 months ago

I don't think it's necessarily a misconception but rather people having different conceptions of what the term "F-Droid" refers to. It could refer to the client, the server tools, a specific server instance, the project, the collection of applications, or possibly other things.

Some people might use "F-Droid" in the same sense as the main page [1] does, to mean "an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications" but others in the sense the about page [2] uses it, referring to the "non-profit volunteer project", which is consistent with the project statues [3]:

F-Droid is the name of a not-for-profit technical, scientific and creative community effort serving the public benefit.

The documentation start page [4] makes it a bit more clear:

F-Droid is both a repository of verified free software Android apps as well as a whole “app store kit”, providing all the tools needed to setup and run an app store. It is a community-run free software project developed by a wide range of contributors. It also includes complete build and release tools for managing the process of turning app source code into published builds.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/

[2] https://f-droid.org/en/about/

[3] https://commonsconservancy.org/dracc/0039/

[4] https://f-droid.org/en/docs/

amake• 7 months ago

I publish an app to the App Store, Google Play, and F-Droid. For years, F-Droid took absolute ages to reflect a new release.

People used to criticize the walled gardens for having capricious reviewers and slow review times, but I found F-Droid much more frustrating to get approval from and much slower to get a release out.

So this development is much appreciated. In fact I had an inkling that build times had improved recently when an update made it out to F-Droid in only a day or two.

user205738• 7 months ago

Disappointed in HN because of these comments

Xunjin• 7 months ago

Criticism is good when it comes with feasible suggestions or even a little help.

I wonder how many of HN audience does know someone, or a guy who knows a guy, which works in a data center able to manage the hardware and a simple email/message/hello there could open a new opportunity.

Dwedit• 7 months ago

Is there anything that can be done about F-Droid downloading very big files (over 50MB) every time it needs to update the repository? I'd expect at the very least regular checkpoint files, then difference files that get you from one checkpoint to the next.

A faster heart for F-Droid

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