Ask Lemmy

It's an alternate app store primarily for FOSS software, including a lot of stuff that you can't find on the Play store. It's very well vetted and there's zero reason not to use it.

If you want a more specific example of something worth getting on F-Droid, there are several adblockers which work significantly better than anything you'll find on the Play Store, simply because the Play Store largely prohibits apps which directly affect the operation of other apps.

You should use Droid-ify it is an alternative app for F-Droid. It lets you automatically update the apps.

You should be weary of anything proprietary. The only good thing about Android is the actual Android Open Source Project before google adds all their proprietary junk on top of it. Like I run Graphene OS; a version of Android that is completely open source and without any Google services whatsoever.

I've been using F-Droid for some years. The things you should know:

• the main repository hosts free and open source apps, you can see the source code if you're unsure if you can trust this particular app. The packages are compiled on F-Droid's servers from the source code, and are signed with F-Droid's signatures (which makes those apps incompatible with versions distributed in Google Play or directly as apk: if you decide to switch, you'll have to figure out how to backup and restore app data for this particular app);
• it also partially protects from developers inserting malware in minor updates;
• app updates occasionally take a week or two to get into the main repository, app developers can do nothing about that;
• various projects host their own F-Droid repositories, which you can add in settings, to release updates quicker and maybe offer beta/nightly builds for testing, and maybe publish something the main repo wouldn't. Before adding one, ask yourself whether you trust this repo;
• F-Droid automatically marks anti-features: ads, tracking code, non-free addons/network services/dependencies/assets, weak signatures, known vulnerabilities. For example, Stealth, a Reddit client, is marked as promoting a non-free network service, Reddit;
• while the apps in the main repository might not represent some niches, some are represented very well and the general signal-to-noise ratio is way higher than in Google Play.

TL;DR: it's not bad at all, and not dangerous unless you do something unreasonable like blindly trusting every app and repo without looking at their website at least once. Your responsibility to determine whether something is trustworthy isn't abstracted away from you - but you're given tools to make your choices easier.

If you want to use open source stuff then it is the best place. I've been slowly replacing proprietary stuff with the stuff that's on there if it is good.

F-Droid is like the Play Store, except everything on it is free and open source.

There are no cons of downloading F-Droid, and they check all of the packages for bad activity before uploading so you should be fine. However, as with many open source software, some of the UX on these free apps might be a bit janky to use.

I don't think there's any reason not to use it. It's carefully curated, I haven't come across any malware on it (of course that doesn't apply if you add random repositories). Personally, whenever I need to download an app, F-Droid is the first place I check.

I use the neostore frontend. Definitely check it out if you want material you

My MO is that when I need an app to do something I look for a good FOSS app via F-Droid first. There's a great list of open source android software here.

Some apps in FDroid require root. If you have rooted your phone be careful about those. I haven't heard of any security issues but as a Linux user of 25+ years I'm paranoid about ever giving apps root access.