Are you tired of Black Friday sales encouraging you to buy more things you don’t need? How about Cyber Monday advertisements asking you to sign up for subscriptions to services you didn’t know existed?

F-Droid has no advertisements, subscriptions, or tracking. It’s just free software and a strong community focus.

You can support F-Droid and avoid consumerism by joining the community for Giving Tuesday, a “global generosity movement unleashing the power of radical generosity”.

If you appreciate the F-Droid project, consider giving in the form of a donation, or by contributing. Your gift, be it donations or volunteering, will help with many areas of the project.

Reasons to give to F-Droid

Advocacy

F-Droid was represented at a recent European Union summit to discuss the technical aspects of the Digital Markets Act. Having a seat at the table for these discussions is important to ensure that the F-Droid community and the broader free software community is represented, rather than leaving regulations to be defined with only the help of large corporations.

Although this visit was kindly funded by the FSFE, this funding is not guaranteed. Your kind donations to F-Droid can help support this important work.

Community

The F-Droid Forum is a vibrant place to discuss free software and the Android ecosystem. In the last 30 days, it had over 1000 posts. A forum this size relies on volunteers for moderation and maintenance.

Maintaining Apps

When you see new or updated apps in F-Droid, it is not just because of the awesome app developers in the community working hard to make great software. It also takes a team of volunteer maintainers from the F-Droid community to get those apps into your hands. Thanks to the tireless work of these volunteers, the main F-Droid repository currently has 3728 apps and a total of 10004 app versions, while the archive repository hosts 53768 past versions of these apps.

Last week alone, that (small) team of volunteer maintainers merged approximately 200 Merge Requests in the fdroiddata repository. Each of these may involve time, discussion, and judgment.

Internationalisation

The F-Droid client is translated into over 50 languages. Furthermore, the server tools, website, app metadata, and many other tools under the F-Droid project are also actively translated by a community of volunteer translators.

In November, translators contributed over 3000 translation updates across the F-Droid project.

Infrastructure

The sheer scale of the F-Droid project is sometimes best understood by looking at the infrastructure required:

Web servers

https://f-droid.org is the home of the F-Droid website, and crucially the apps, assets, and metadata required for apps in the main F-Droid repository.

In a single week in November, this website (not counting the many mirrors generously contributed by the community):

• served over 100,000,000 HTTP requests,
• handled over 500,000 downloads of the main F-Droid package,
• and received over 230,000 hits on the home page.

Note that as with everything in the F-Droid ecosystem, these metrics were designed to be published openly without privacy concerns. If you spot a problem, please report it.

Build Servers

Each day, the “checkupdates” job runs to see if there are any new versions of apps to build. A typical job downloads the source code repositories for over 5000 apps to perform this task.

Once new versions are identified, a buildserver with 20 CPUs and 32GB of RAM will build each updated app, ready to serve to your phone.

In Summary

In a world dominated by large proprietary app stores, F-Droid is a beacon in the free software ecosystem.

If you are in a position to do so, please consider giving this Giving Tuesday by either donating, or contributing to the project.