Slowly getting faster

We have been a bit quiet recently on some fronts, like this blog and on
merge requests to review. We strive to keep our users informed, and we
always appreciate contributions, even when we cannot immediately review
them. F-Droid started in 2010, so we have some technical debt and cannot
always move fast. We appreciate patience when contributing. The good news
is that this is because we are really quite busy with a whole slew of large
improvements that all seemed to happen at the same time. So here is a quick
overview:

• You might have noticed that this website sometimes ran really slowly. We
  have been working to improve that. Since we rolled out the new front
  facing web servers, we have seen a large improvement there. And now we
  get better data about network usage and server state which means that we
  can more effectively troubleshoot and optimize going forward.

• We’re wrapping up a major
  overhaul of the
  official F-Droid client app (thanks to FFDW funding), including a
  security audit (thanks to
  NLnet funding). This
  replaces huge chunks of technical debt, fixes many bugs, adds a
  comprehensive test suite, and should make it much easier for contributors
  to follow the code.

• There are new contributor buildserver instances for testing app builds
  on the production setup. This has sped up the app review process,
  especially for key apps that are complicated to build, like Element or Jitsi Meet. These instances also let us do regular,
  repo-wide scans to find any non-free
  dependencies that
  have might have snuck in.

• After using the Ansible automation for contributor buildserver
  instances, this setup is now proven, and we are now switching the
  production setup to use it. That means anyone can inspect and recreate
  the production setup with relative ease.

• We are setting up new hardware for the production buildserver to enable
  parallelizing the build
  processes.

• We are finalizing our new legal entity with its own board of directors.

• Setting up more F-Droid core contributors to get paid to work on F-Droid.

And that is just a sample of what all is going on. F-Droid can move faster
with more contributions, and we want your contributions! It can be anything
from app
reviews, diving in
to fix
issues,
and donations to enable more people to spend more time to making F-Droid better.