I hope this topic hasn’t been discussed yet; I certainly haven’t come across it. On my device (iodéOS 7.4 (2026-04-01)), the F-Droid Privileged Extension 0.2.13 is installed by default. I’ve now taken a look at the target SDK and minimum SDK values for my installed apps. I was already aware that the target SDK values for the extension are very low (25). I’d also read before that this is correct and desirable, as the extension is primarily needed on older Android versions that don’t yet support the new installation method. What surprises/confuses me, however, is the incredibly high minimum SDK of 36 (=Android 16). That doesn’t really allow installing the F-Droid Privileged Extension on older versions (it would be different if the minimum SDK were 25 and the target 36. That would make sense, in my opinion (although the minimum SDK could easily be set even lower)).
I know full well that this is completely unsuitable for Android 12+ devices—just tell iodé that. I don’t use F-Droid at all; I use Obtainium instead. But none of that changes the fact that the SDKs are set up backwards (the SDKs don’t change; they’re specified in the app’s manifest; the minimum SDK is set to Android 16, which is higher than the target SDK), meaning that on devices running Android 16 or lower, you can only update the app via root (which the privileged extension naturally has) or ADB, which doesn’t seem very logical to me.