Giving Tuesday – December 3rd, 2024
Are you tired of Black Friday sales encouraging you to buy more things you
don’t need? How about Cyber Monday advertisements asking you to sign up for
subscriptions to services you didn’t know existed?
F-Droid has no advertisements, subscriptions, or tracking. It’s just free
software and a strong community focus.
You can support F-Droid and avoid consumerism by joining the community for
Giving Tuesday, a “global generosity
movement unleashing the power of radical generosity”.
If you appreciate the F-Droid project, consider giving in the form of a
donation, or by
contributing. Your gift, be it donations
or volunteering, will help with many areas of the project.
Reasons to give to F-Droid
Advocacy
F-Droid was represented at a recent European Union summit to discuss the
technical aspects of the Digital Markets Act. Having a seat at the table for
these discussions is important to ensure that the F-Droid community and the
broader free software community is represented, rather than leaving
regulations to be defined with only the help of large corporations.
Although this visit was kindly funded by the FSFE, this
funding is not guaranteed. Your kind
donations to F-Droid can help support this
important work.
The F-Droid Forum is a vibrant place to discuss
free software and the Android ecosystem. In the last 30 days, it had over
1000 posts. A forum this size relies on
volunteers for moderation and maintenance.
Maintaining Apps
When you see new or updated apps in F-Droid, it is not just because of the
awesome app developers in the community working hard to make great
software. It also takes a team of volunteer maintainers from the F-Droid
community to get those apps into your hands. Thanks to the tireless work of
these volunteers, the main F-Droid repository currently has 3728 apps and a
total of 10004 app versions, while the archive repository hosts 53768 past
versions of these apps.
Last week alone, that (small) team of volunteer maintainers merged
approximately 200 Merge Requests in the fdroiddata repository. Each of these
may involve time, discussion, and judgment.
Internationalisation
The F-Droid client is
translated into over
50 languages. Furthermore, the server tools, website, app metadata, and
many other tools under the F-Droid
project are also actively
translated by a community of volunteer translators.
In November, translators contributed over 3000 translation
updates
across the F-Droid project.
Infrastructure
The sheer scale of the F-Droid project is sometimes best understood by
looking at the infrastructure required:
Web servers
https://f-droid.org is the home of the F-Droid website, and crucially the
apps, assets, and metadata required for apps in the main F-Droid repository.
In a single week in November, this website (not counting the many
mirrors generously contributed by
the community): * served over 100,000,000 HTTP requests, * handled over
500,000 downloads of the main F-Droid package, * and received over 230,000
hits on the home page.
Note that as with everything in the F-Droid ecosystem, these metrics were designed to be published openly without privacy concerns. If you spot a problem, please report it.
Build Servers
Each day, the “checkupdates” job runs to see if there are any new versions
of apps to build. A typical
job
downloads the source code repositories for over 5000 apps to perform this
task.
Once new versions are identified, a buildserver with 20 CPUs and 32GB of RAM
will build each updated app, ready to serve to your phone.
Summary
In a world dominated by large proprietary app stores, F-Droid is a beacon in
the free software ecosystem.
If you are in a position to do so, please consider giving this Giving
Tuesday by either donating, or
contributing to the project.
