Guys, I understand your frustration about how slow F-Droid delivers updates. Let me explan why this happens. F-Droid cycle looks like this:
- Check for updates. F-Droid downloads recent changes of 2365 apps and parses them to find new releases.
- Build. For each new release F-Droid starts a VM and builds it from scratch. Usually there are dozens. Even the smallest utility needs 7 minutes to build, while each Fennec APK will take up to 5 hours.
- Generate index. F-Droid gathers metadata from fdroiddata (2773 entries), apps source code (98 file trees) and APKs (19229 of them, each needs to be unzipped and parsed).
- Sign APKs and index. Ciaran manually transfers APKs and the new index to an air-gapped system (it has no Internet connection to avoid signing keys leaks), signs them and brings signed files back.
Hopefully you now see why each stage takes many hours and the whole cycle takes days.