F-Droid's Biggest Redesign in 10 Years Arrives With a Warning
F-Droid ships its first full redesign in a decade — new navigation, rewritten in Kotlin Compose — while Google prepares to require every Android developer to register by 2027.
The main navigation drops to three items: Discover, Search, My Apps. Categories now live inside Discover, and Settings and Nearby Swap sit in the top bar, one tap away. After 14 test releases and more than a year of work, F-Droid 2.0 is out — the project’s largest update in a decade, with key components rewritten in Kotlin Compose.
The redesign is mostly about discovery. As the catalog grew into the thousands, finding the right app grew harder. A browsable Discover tab and better search are the right fix, and My Apps holds installed apps, updates and issues in one place. The Compose rewrite is the bigger bet: it should let the next round of improvements land faster than this one did.
The timing is the problem. In August 2025, Google announced that from 2027 every Android developer must register centrally with Google before their app can be installed on any device — not just Play Store listings, all apps. Skip registration and the app is silently blocked worldwide, on phones people already own. F-Droid calls the threat ‘existential’; Cory Doctorow calls it ‘Darth Android’.
I would install the 2.0 update and treat the registration rule as the thing that decides whether any of it matters. A cleaner storefront is worth little if the software inside cannot reach a phone. Picture a phone in 2027: a growing list of apps that will not install, no message saying why. Put F-Droid on every Android device you own this week.