How many F-Droid frontends do you need to download from the F-Droid app store? The answer is 7

G-Droid
Neo Store
Droid-ify
F-Droid Classic
Aurora Droid
Foxy Droid
M-Droid

IzzyOnDroid (could just be configured within F-Droid to include this repo)

Forks happen for a few reasons but the official client has never given reason to need one. Unmaintained clients hinder future progress of the official client. How many of these forks are one developer forks?

Open source should mean contributing, not copying. I don’t know how I would feel spending thousands of hours coding an app for someone to click a button, rebrand it, and get a bunch of pats on the back when they could’ve contributed to the original.

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Obviously you’re wrong, as any actual comparison meat would show. Everyone knows F-Droid Classic is best! Yeah, I was mistaken before too, but live and learn. :slight_smile:

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Open source means that each contribute to the projects that they wish and how they wish.

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Do note that I don’t like forks either, specially when they’re started to “fix” something but they never contribute back to original, or just change colours then go and die because maintenance is hard.

Your list:

  • G-Droid - not sure if still developed, just a fix in latest
  • Neo Store - fork of the one below because the dev was busy, new job
  • Droid-ify - maybe still developed as dev has free time, fork of Foxy
  • F-Droid Classic - fork of old 0.102 (before the UI update)
  • Aurora Droid - sister app of Aurora Store (for Play)
  • Foxy Droid - fork of old 0.102 (before the UI update) not sure if developed
  • M-Droid - Material update but no longer developed
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These are all great points. I simply wonder if we need backup appstore apps on the appstore in case the appstore is no longer an appstore.

Those are not backup options, those are fancy choices.

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Maintained by @Bubu who was previously forum moderator and f-droid contributor IIUC.

Maintained on more “free” self-hosted gitlab iiuc.

Ironically, has its own repo for faster updates, to reduce delays after including f-droid official client updates? Or maybe for better control, and independence?

Better interface and search, with better options. YMMV.

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Betas too, also since it’s reproducible this is fine :wink:

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I think it’s good - it shows how popular FDroid is. Do you know how many browsers are Chrome/Chromium based? like half of them now. And there are are/were at least half a dozen browsers based on Firefox/Gecko technology as well. Gecko-based browsers - LinuxReviews

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Some people also go for selling the forked app on Play Store without even changing a word. It’s really frustrating to see them earning for the app from which the original maintainer or developer gets nothing.

Aurora has been a big help in the past to access apps only on google play but without the bullshit process of handing your adrenochrome to google. Their ability to spoof ownership of an active google account has always been something I’d like to have in browsers so you can bypass youtube age restriction without using a third party site like 9xbuddy

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No one was discussing Aurora Store but Aurora Droid

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There are a few reasons to choose a alternative frontend:

  • GrapheneOS: You simply have to confirm every install when you update apps. With Droidify you do that once for every app and then never again. (It’s just faster and much more usable when you are not rooted)
  • Android TV: The original client is not usable with a remote control. So is doidify in my expierience. BUT NeoStore works just fine

With Droidify you also get a better repository-manager and muuuuuch faster syncs. As for me: I need to run a OS without root to install my banking apps in a work profile to work. Droidify is just much more convenient to use than the original store.

But yes, it woul be nice to only have one store that has the best of all of them…

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Anyone know how they do it? I see Droidify and Neostore apks are less than half the size of F-Droid official, which can’t hurt. They’re working on speed and data leak improvement too.

Total overhaul of downloading logic for improved performance and mirrors support.
Reduced a privacy leak with TLS Sessions

Unfortunately, those two are developed on Microsoft proprietary github, so I will probably boycott them.

Yes, they don’t process all languages, iirc.

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+1, a semi official test fork:

DEfO ECH Apps (Experimental fork of F-Droid to use TLS ECH with Cloudflare as the default host) - DEfO ECH Apps | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

I think it’s the API level. FDroid uses a much lower one, which is understandable for backwards compatibility, but it just makes sense to use a more modern one like Neo Store on newer versions.

The only thing I don’t like about f-droid is the bad in-app search experience. I remember there being a post about it, explaining why is that so. I can’t remember the rason though :sweat_smile:

Youtube? Don’t you not know about newpipe? I thought everyone here should know about newpipe. Without newpipe I wouldn’t be watching the adtube(youtube)…

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