F-Droid 2.0 rolls out with Kotlin Compose rebuild, smarter search and auto-updates

A decade's biggest release

F-Droid, the community-run repository for free and open-source Android applications, has released version 2.0 of its official client. According to the project's announcement, which surfaced on Hacker News's front page on September 24, the release is a complete redesign and the app's largest update in ten years. It follows more than a year of work and 14 test releases, and it will reach users gradually over the coming weeks.

Rebuilt on Kotlin Compose

The redesign goes deeper than a fresh coat of paint. The F-Droid team says key components were reworked and rewritten in Kotlin Compose, the toolkit that is now standard for Android interface work, and that the app follows current Android design conventions such as Material Design while keeping long-familiar F-Droid interactions intact. The rewrite is positioned as a foundation that should let improvements ship faster going forward.

Navigation has been trimmed to three destinations: Discover, Search and My Apps. Categories now live inside Discover rather than acting as a separate section, while My Apps becomes the central hub for installed apps, pending updates and potential problems. Settings and Nearby Swap are still reachable from the top bar but no longer compete for space in the main navigation.

Finding apps in a catalog of thousands

With the repository having grown to thousands of apps, F-Droid 2.0 leans heavily on discovery. The new Discover screen highlights newly added and recently updated apps, and now also showcases the repository's most downloaded apps. The category system was significantly expanded with more specialized entries — VPNs, firewalls, password managers, app launchers and navigation tools among them — plus higher-level “meta” categories that group related ones to make browsing more approachable. The Games category alone now distinguishes 17 different genres instead of lumping all games together.

Search has been rebuilt to look beyond app names into descriptions, categories and translated content, so apps can be found by what they do rather than what they are called. Support for Chinese, Japanese and Korean has improved substantially, and recent searches are remembered for quick reuse. Results can be narrowed with combinable filters covering category, device compatibility and anti-features — for example, showing only action games that run on your device and do not depend on non-free network services. New onboarding screens spread throughout the app explain these features in context rather than hiding them in settings.

The project also points out that all of this happens without tracking users or using engagement tactics to keep them inside the app.

Installs and updates get quieter

Installation, long a weak point for third-party stores on Android, has been overhauled. F-Droid credits new Android capabilities that arrived largely under pressure from the EU's Digital Markets Act and antitrust actions elsewhere, and says the app now uses a unified installer for every install regardless of whether F-Droid came built into the OS or was installed by the user. Through a new pre-approval API, users on supported devices confirm an installation right after requesting it instead of after the download finishes — an experience F-Droid says comes much closer to what the built-in app store provides.

Updates are now fetched and installed automatically by default, though existing user preferences are respected and fine-grained manual controls remain available. The familiar pull-to-refresh gesture is gone; the gesture is reserved for scrolling, and manual update checks moved to the overflow menu on the My Apps screen. Data usage settings were reworked as well, so that users with expensive mobile data, strict privacy requirements or low-powered devices can better control what gets downloaded and when.

Why it matters

F-Droid is the main distribution channel for free and open-source software on Android outside the big commercial stores, and its client has often lagged in usability. A faster, easier-to-browse app built on a modern toolkit lowers the barrier to entry for users and helps the volunteer ecosystem behind the repository grow. The release is also a concrete example of regulation reshaping a platform: without the DMA-driven changes to Android's installer APIs, the unified, near-native install experience F-Droid now offers would not have been possible. For alternative app stores more broadly, it signals what becomes feasible once platform gatekeeping eases.