Update android app store F-Droid makes updating repository much faster

F-Droid, the alternative Android app store that offers only free and open source apps, has made a change to its repository format that should make retrieving the list of available apps and their details much faster.

F-Droid 1.16.1

Torsten Grote, one of the contributors to F-Droid, reports that the size of the repository had become a problem. “Currently, the compressed index is 8MB, which is 33MB uncompressed. Each client has to download and process that 8MB each time. This problematic trend became apparent some time ago.”

As of version 1.16 of F-Droid, things are different. The repo index, which uses JSON formatting, now uses a merge patch originally released in 2014. The index can still be downloaded in full after this, but it also contains references to diff files that can be downloaded separately. “At the time of writing, the latest diff is 80KB compressed and 241KB uncompressed.” The result of this is that F-Droid ‘refreshes’ faster, because it requires less bandwidth and processing power.

Administrators of third party F-Droid repos can update to the latest version of fdroidserver and the repository will be built in the new style. The old format is also retained to accommodate older clients.

Furthermore, Grote reports that there is better support for mirrors to relieve the main server. Devices with little ram should also be able to run this version better, because the index is read from storage streaming instead of being loaded completely into the working memory.

F-Droid not only offers open source software, but also notes ‘anti-features’ at apps. Examples include advertising, tracking, vulnerability and partial use of proprietary code. Some well-known apps, such as VLC, Nextcloud, DuckDuckGo, Proton Mail, Telegram and Wireguard can be found on F-Droid. A log-in is not required for use.