F-Droid
The catalogue and installer for free and open-source Android applications, and the distribution channel both anysoftkeyboard and termux (cross-wiki, osint-wiki) treat as their real home. Discovered while ingesting those two sources; paged because it recurs rather than because either source describes it at length.
What the corpus actually evidences about it is narrow, and it is all about the relationship between a project and the vendor store it is avoiding:
- AnySoftKeyboard ships to both F-Droid and Google Play, with alpha, beta and stable channels on the latter.
- Termux treats F-Droid as canonical and its Play build as an “experimental branch” with “missing
functionality and bugs,” recommending that everyone who can should use F-Droid or the GitHub build
instead. The stated cause is a platform policy change: Google Play removed the
sharedUserIdrequirement, which makes Play installs incompatible with F-Droid ones.
That second case is the more interesting one, and it is the reason this node exists. A store policy change did not merely inconvenience the project — it split the user base into two incompatible installations of the same application. Distributing outside the vendor store is what makes a foss-application on a locked platform possible, and the incompatibility is the cost.
Everything else about F-Droid — its build and reproducibility policy, its signing model, its governance and funding — is not evidenced by anything held here. Thin node deliberately; page it properly if a source about F-Droid itself arrives.