Running into a bizarre issue I have an android Ebook reader when WIFI is not available I will sometimes connect it to my cell phone using a tethering app that works over usb debugging, I can confirm the tablet has a working internet connection Play services work and I can access internet resources through browsers and other apps. However F-Droid will show a constant no internet error and fail to resolve host names when updating I have a suspicion that something is overriding the VPN the tethering app creates and preventing F-Droid from using this connection. Does anyone have any idea what causes this and how to force F-Droid to use network connections other than WIFI and Cell data?
Why do you need a special tethering App? Which one? Any phone will offer you WiFi hotspot and USB tethering out of the box?
Think this is a known issue unfortunately.
These reverse connections are odd. 
Would be nice to see a log of this.
USB tethering via VPN is often not detected as an internet connection by some app.
A workaround I founded for F-Droid is to the “Latests” tab and scroll from the top to trigger a repo update. In this case the internet connection will not be checked and you can update your app.
See network access via gnirehtet does not work (#2111) · Issues · F-Droid / Client · GitLab
Interesting… I was wondering why my F-Droid never checks for updates no matter what settings I try and am doing the manual refresh.
However my phone has a normal mobile connection, although most of the time I use either Netguard or RethinkDNS. Maybe it is a similar problem after all? However no other app showed any problems so far 
What did you set exactly?
Always use WiFi, always use data and daily update.
Looking at it now I see something rather odd: where the automatic update interval is set to hourly it says “earliest next update January 5”
If the date is in the past it means it was dead when the schedule came 
I blame your OS
Are you on latest 1.22 or 1.23-alpha?
Try to except F-Droid from battery optimisations ,eg. https://dontkillmyapp.com
After doing the manual update it still displays next automatic update January 5th. No idea if its the last or next January?
F-Droid should detect this condition upon next invocation and do something sensible, like update immediately and warn the user.
Battery optimisations and everything I could find were off.
Yes I am on 1.22.0
Can you move the timing slider to the right or left one position then back? Iirc it resets the scheduler
Moving it one position to the right it displays next update in 3 hours. Moving it back to the right it says next update one hour ago again so this doesn’t reset it.
Moving it all the way left and all the way right again it says next update in 40 minutes so this apparently resets it, the next update still won’t work though.
this means it’s reset yes 
that the time is no longer in the past
now, set a low time frame and see what happens by tomorrow
Read again, moving it back to the original position it says one hour ago again.
Only moving all the way to left will apparently reset it.
Anyway, this must happen automatically. There are so many reasons a single update may fail… phone turned off, in airplane…
If it needs to be manually reset after every single failure it will stop working for everyone sooner or later.
In fact I have installed F-Droid for a couple of friends and never seen it updating automatically.
ah, ok, so have it on “ago” and give us the adb log run as:
adb shell dumpsys jobscheduler | grep -B 3 -A 35 "Service: org.fdroid.fdroid/androidx.work.impl.background.systemjob.SystemJobService"