With 2024 now behind us, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the growth and achievements we accomplished as a community last year, and celebrate the incredible support we received from the FOSS community throughout the journey.
This year has been a milestone for us, with significant strides in decentralizing app distribution, expanding the F-Droid ecosystem, and solidifying our infrastructure. All of these advancements were made possible thanks to donations, grants, our volunteers and regular contributors. So thank you again to everyone who helped make 2024 another great year for F-Droid. Now let’s take a closer look at what we accomplished.
One of the most important initiatives we worked on in 2024 was the continued development of our app decentralization efforts. Our aim is to make F-Droid a more robust and accessible platform, making further in-roads into the hold Big Tech currently has on app distribution. Building on the work we started in 2022, as a part of the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web grant, we continued to make substantial progress this year in providing developers and end-users with more options to distribute their apps through a decentralized, equitable and privacy-oriented process. The goal for this project is to enable individuals and organizations to mirror and distribute F-Droid apps in a community-driven fashion, reducing reliance on centralized services. This work ties into a larger vision of creating a truly open-source ecosystem for Android apps that is not governed by proprietary companies.
In 2024 we completed the following infrastructure upgrades:
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Broke out and overhauled core client logic around publishing and consuming repositories.
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Made client logic into libraries to make it easy to embed repositories in any app that needs it.
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Added support for mirroring repositories onto both IPFS and Filecoin.
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Added support in F-Droid client to use mirrors and repositories hosted on IPFS and Filecoin.
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Improved F-Droid client “whitelabel builds”.
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Enhanced F-Droid client’s existing “nearby” and “app swap” capabilities.
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Updated F-Droid’s Repomaker tool (for easy “point and click” curation and publishing of app repos) and add support for IPFS publishing.
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Supported iOS apps and progressive web apps (PWA) as packages that can be shipped via repositories.
2024 marked the end of this grant period, however the tools, features and policies established within the scope of the grant, will continue to be developed thanks to donations and other funders who are committed to further decentralizing app distribution.