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 sharedUserId requirement, 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.

The counter-case (2026-09-01)

pocketpal-ai is the first FOSS Android application in this corpus that never mentions F-Droid at all. MIT-licensed, 8,137 stars, and it has no F-Droid entry — the F-Droid API returns 404 for com.pocketpalai, checked 2026-09-01. What the README offers is the App Store and Google Play, in two badges, and the build instructions below are addressed to contributors.

The sideload path exists anyway, unmarked: every GitHub release attaches app-prod-release.apk, and the downloads are not small — 6,154 on v1.17.2 within a week, 16,891 on v1.16.1. So this is not a project that closed the door; it is one that never put up a sign.

That matters here because the project is otherwise the corpus's most committed refuser of other people's servers, running its language models on the phone and saying so in every second line. Refusing the cloud and choosing F-Droid turn out to be separable decisions. Whatever pushes a project onto F-Droid, it is not simply caring about user autonomy — anysoftkeyboard and termux had reasons this one does not share, and the corpus does not yet hold what they are.

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.