Since the early days of
2010, F-Droid
is a repository of apps (not an app store). Its client app always
allowed to add third-party
repositories.
Today, there are hundreds of
repositories and we
are
improving
how the client app is handling those:
- the official repository is preferred by default
- the repository an app comes from is prominently shown
- if an app is available from more than one repository, you can choose where
to get it from
- power users can change global repository priorities
- archives are part of their main repository and not listed separately
Previously, if you added a new repository, it would get added with a higher
priority than the pre-added official F-Droid repository. This allowed the
newly added repository to override apps built by F-Droid. They could
alter the app description and offer their own versions of the app for
installation. With the new 1.20 release of the official F-Droid client app,
newly added repositories get added with a lower priority, so that the apps
from the F-Droid repository take precedence by default.
Furthermore, when tapping an app, the user sees the app details screen as
usual. However, now a new box at the top clearly shows the repository the
app comes from.
All information on that page including the versions of the app that are
considered for installation are provided by the repository that is shown in
the box at the top. This was only implicit and hard to discover before.
If the app is available from more than one repository, the box in the app
details screen becomes a drop-down where the user can see all repositories
and choose which one should be used for installation, updates and app
information.
The list of repositories available in the settings now has a defined order.
Before, repositories at the bottom implicitly had a higher priority than
those at the top. This was counter-intuitive and thus changed. Since
version 1.20, the repository at the top has the highest priority while the
repo at the bottom has the lowest priority. Users that upgrade from old
versions may find that the order of their repositories has reversed. This
is to not force the new behavior upon them, but to keep priorities how they
were before. Note that the position or priority of a repository only
matters if an app is available from more than one repo.
It is now also possible to re-order the position of repositories in the
list. For example, if NewPipe’s repo was added and the user always wants to
prefer apps from that repo, they can move it to the top.
Repositories can have an archive where old apps or old versions of apps
that are no longer relevant get moved to. Historically, these archives were
shown as regular repositories to the user. Now, they are no longer shown in
the list, but have moved to the details screen of each repository.
If, for some reason, you want to check the archive, you can enable it here.
For repositories that do not have an archive, enabling this will simply
fail.
All these changes are new in version 1.20 which goes through alpha and beta
stages before published for everyone. We encourage users to opt-in to beta
testing of F-Droid by visiting the app details screen of F-Droid itself,
then at the top right corner select the three dot menu and select “Allow
Beta Updates”. The final version 1.20 is already live, but will undergo
more testing until deemed suggested.
