F-Droid 2.0: the free app store's biggest rebuild in ten years

A year of work and fourteen test builds

On 24 September 2026, the project announced on its blog the release of F-Droid 2.0: a complete rebuild of the official app, which its authors call the biggest update in ten years. More than a year of work, fourteen test builds before this one, and a rollout that will reach users gradually over the coming weeks.

This is not a fresh coat of paint. The experience has been reworked to line up with current Android conventions, Material Design included, while keeping the house-style interactions that long-time users have in their muscle memory. The key components have been reworked and rewritten in Kotlin Compose — today’s standard toolkit, according to the project — to lay a foundation that lets improvements ship faster in the years ahead. Translation: the technical debt has just been paid off. Now we find out what the credit gets spent on.

Three tabs, and the rest moves upstairs

Main navigation now fits into three areas: Discover, Search and My Apps. Categories have moved into Discover, which turns browsing by theme into a proper way around the store rather than a cupboard under the stairs. My Apps becomes the single place to handle installed apps, updates and anything that has gone wrong. Settings and Nearby Swap haven’t vanished, they’ve moved up to the top bar, one tap away, where they no longer elbow everything else for room.

Discover itself no longer stops at new arrivals and recent updates: it also surfaces the most-downloaded apps in the repository. On a catalogue that now runs to thousands of apps, that was the missing piece — until now you had to know an app existed before you could go looking for it.

Categories brought down to what you actually do

The category system has been widened considerably: instead of a handful of very broad headings, F-Droid now offers specialised categories — VPNs, firewalls, password managers, launchers, navigation tools. To keep all of that navigable, meta-categories group related headings together on the Discover screen. Category names and descriptions also feed discovery elsewhere in the app.

The showcase is Games, rebuilt from scratch: it now separates seventeen genres instead of tipping everything into the same bin. That’s the sort of detail nobody puts in a press release, and exactly the sort that decides whether you find something worth installing or put the phone back down.

A search that reads the descriptions

Search no longer stops at app names: it also covers descriptions, categories and translated content, so you can search for what an app does rather than for whatever somebody decided to call it. The project flags a lot of work on Chinese, Japanese and Korean scripts, badly served until now, and search remembers your recent queries.

On top of that come filters you can stack: category, compatibility with your device, anti-features. You can, for example, show only action games that will run on your phone while dropping the ones that lean on proprietary network services.

The project notes in passing that none of this involves tracking you, or trying to keep you in the app any longer than you need to be. A store that works on discovery without working on your retention: that’s the genuinely odd thing about this release.