F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree

Summary

For the past 15 years, F-Droid has provided a safe and secure haven for Android users around the world to find and install free and open source apps. When contrasted with the commercial app stores — of which the Google Play store is the most prominent — the differences are stark: they are hotbeds of spyware and scams, blatantly promoting apps that prey on their users through attempts to monetize their attention and mine their intimate information through any means necessary, including trickery and dark patterns.[^spyware1] https://f-droid.org/2025/09/04/twif.html [^spyware1]: “Spyware maker caught distributing malicious Android apps for years”: https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/13/spyware-maker-caught-distributing-malicious-android-apps-for-years F-Droid is different. It distributes apps that have been validated to work for the user’s interests, rather than for the interests of the app’s distributors. The way F-Droid works is simple: when a developer creates an app and hosts the source code publicly somewhere, the F-Droid team reviews it, inspecting it to ensure that it is completely open source and contains no undocumented anti-features such as advertisements or trackers. Once it passes inspection, the F-Droid build service compiles and packages the app to make it ready for distribution. The package is then signed either with F-Droid’s cryptographic key, or, if the build is reproducible[^reproducible], enables distribution using the original developer’s private key. In this way, users can trust that any app distributed through F-Droid is the one that was built from the specified source code and has not been tampered with. https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/ [^reproducible]: F-Droid Reproducible Builds Introduction: https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/ Do you want a weather app that doesn’t transmit your every movement to a shadowy data broker? Or a scheduling assistant that doesn’t siphon your intimate details into an advertisement network[^surveillance-a...