F-Droid 2.0 lands: full Compose rewrite, smarter discovery, DMA-powered installs

F-Droid has shipped its biggest update in a decade, a ground-up rewrite of the open-source Android app store built on Kotlin Compose and Material Design after 14 test releases. Navigation collapses into three areas — Discover, Search, and My Apps — with Settings and Nearby Swap moved off the main bar. The overhaul targets a long-standing problem: with thousands of apps in the repository, finding the right one had become hard, so the new Discover screen surfaces popular, new, and updated apps, and the category system has been heavily expanded (games alone now split into 17 genres) with higher-level ‘meta’ categories for browsing. Notably, F-Droid says it does this without tracking users or engagement-baiting them into longer sessions.

Search now indexes app descriptions, categories, and translated text rather than just names, with substantially better handling of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean scripts, plus recent-query history. New combinable filters let users narrow lists by category, device compatibility, or anti-features — for example, excluding apps that depend on non-free network services — and contextual onboarding screens surface these advanced options instead of burying them in settings.

The most consequential change is under the hood: F-Droid now uses a unified installer that taps Android’s new pre-approval API, letting users confirm an install up front rather than after download. F-Droid credits regulatory pressure — the EU’s Digital Markets Act and antitrust actions — for forcing Android to open smoother install and update flows to third-party stores, narrowing the gap with the built-in Play Store. Updates now fetch and install automatically by default (existing preferences are preserved), and pull-to-refresh has been dropped in favor of background update checks, with manual controls relegated to an overflow menu.