F-Droid

In the mirror universe

Posted on Apr 09, 2026 by linsui

This Week in F-Droid

TWIF curated on Thursday, 09 Apr 2026, Week 15

F-Droid core

Mirrors are an integral part of F-Droid, as a vector for decentralization and user freedom. Besides our main servers, we had about 16 mirrors spread between Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Finland, France, Sweden, Taiwan, Singapore and the US. While the spread seems good enough, this planet is larger than 9 countries, no matter how good Internet interconnections are.

This April we’ve added 3 more mirrors from Romania meant for better coverage around the Balkans as a whole. The new servers are activated by default so you don’t need to setup anything. Many thanks go to chroot and Hostico for providing them, but also for being long time supporters of many important FLOSS projects.

I feel that my app installs are slow and my country was not listed above! Sure, networking is a complex subject, let’s also detail a bit what it takes for a mirror to end up in your client.

Given that we are celebrating 16 years of F-Droid means we are thinking in the long term, and we expect the servers that we use or link to, to have the same goals. Any future mirror needs to be hosted on like-minded infrastructure.

What does this mean in practice?

First of all, we are few and we probably don’t live near you, we need you to step up and lead this process for your own benefit first and then for all the others around you.

There are many hosters that might be sympathetic to our (and your) cause, so you’ll start by finding those in your country that might be a good fit. Seek a contact method (e-mail probably), try “tech support” not “accounting”, and ping them with the question, in your native language.

No matter the order of actions, you’ll need to look around and dig more info about them.

Take a look at how they are hosting in general. Is it another CDN (we already have Cloudflare, no need for another instance of it, thanks), baremetal, VPS or an array of Raspberry Pi’s? Can its hosting cope with another Google announcement of locking Android even more? We know our main server fronters cry a bit when news is out…

Who hosts it? Is it a company, institution or individual? How is their public track record? Are they already mirroring other FLOSS projects like the Linux Kernel, Debian, Arch, etc.?

Do they have a privacy policy? Are they supporting privacy by default? Are they not retain any data longer than is necessary?

If a mirror was set, we can start to monitor it to assess its speed and consistency of synchronizing, by first listing it in our mirror-monitor.

And if all these above are true and good, did you test it in your client? Multiple clients? Everything was fine for a few weeks?

Many questions need to be asked, but this ensures the next time you want to get the latest index, update apps or install a new app, everything runs smooth and you spend more time exploring that app and not watching a “snake” slithering slowly across your screen.

Want to start this journey for your country? Join our discussion in the dedicated issue, as we can share some stats and maybe a template for you to use when contacting hosters around you.

Community News

The old Lichess app was replaced by the new one, added last week, and aptly named the same: Lichess. If you’ve installed the app before last week make sure you install the new app and uninstall the old one.

Session F-Droid was updated to 1.33.2 but this might the last version, as the whole project is so under funded that they have entered their last 90 days of service. We’ve told you about their donations plea 3 weeks ago but since they did not reach the needed $1 million (this is the yearly cost of operation) all employees were let go and only maintenance by volunteers will take place until July 8. Read the full announcement here.

CodeDoctor puts on the bunny ears:

Happy Easter to everyone!

As a special treat for the holidays, I am incredibly excited to announce the release of Butterfly 2.5.0!

The update brings many long-awaited features and improvements to the app. From a rebuilt template system to custom keybindings and new touch shortcuts, this release focuses on customization and stability.

Highlights:

📓 Rebuilt Template System
🎨 Shape Styles
⌨️ Custom Keybindings
👆 New Touch Shortcuts
☁️ WebDAV Rewrite
📄 Improved PDF Rendering
🔷 Improved Polygon Workflow
📁 File Management Improvements
🖥️ Better Presentation Mode
💾 Better Export & Data Settings
🔤 Better Arabic Font
📋 Improved Logs

Read more here

@shuvashish76 sharpens the feed:

NewsBlur - News reader was updated to 14.2. We skipped version 14.0 so this update adds even more polish and fixes on top. What’s new? You get a redesigned reading experience, discover related sites, daily briefing, refined dark themes, story list header bar, redesigned preferences and menus, Ask AI and more.

Newly Added Apps

16 apps were newly added
  • audav: A cross-platform player for audiobooks stored on NextCloud/WebDAV
  • Bag: Bitcoin price tracker & net worth dashboard. No ads, no accounts, privacy-first.
  • Banana Split: Split secrets into QR-code shards using Shamir’s Secret Sharing
  • BlockAds: Clean Internet: Block ads & trackers system-wide. Firewall, SafeSearch, profiles
  • Call Blocker: Block unwanted calls, spam and telemarketing
  • Dima Defense: A simple Tower Defense game that was made in LibGDX
  • HiddenProtectedWorkProfile: Hidden Profile owner security app
  • Kompact: Compress and convert images offline. Batch select, set quality, and export
  • LearnTube: A learning-focused YouTube client with progress tracking and notes
  • Minesweeper: Beautiful Minesweeper. No ads, no trackers, no permissions.
  • Nian: Collection of word games in Swedish
  • Quick Ball: A Quick Action Ball that gives fast access to controls —volume, brightness, lock
  • Sobuu: Track books reading and organise your readings
  • SubSonicSter: Play Hitster card game with your own SubSonic music server
  • Tapjacking Bypass: Allow obscured touches for specific apps
  • WallApp: WebView wrapper for the TheWallApp wallpaper website

Updated Apps

184 more apps were updated
(expand for the full list)

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