Android has supportedalternative app storessince its inception, but for the longest time, they haven’t been treated as equal citizens compared to thePlay Store(or Android Market in the beginning). Google has been working on improving support, with an API that allows for unattended, hands-free updates representing a vital advancement introduced in Android 12. One and a half years later, one of the most popular distributors of open-source apps finally added support for this API.
The app store in question is F-Droid, which offers a centralized repository for free and open source apps for Android. The store itself is also open source. In contrast to pre-installed alternatives to Google Play, like the Galaxy Store on Samsung phones, F-Droid doesn’t have the necessary permissions out of the box to allow installing and updating apps in the background, without explicitly asking the user for permission. With the unattended updates API, this is changing.
Version 1.19 of F-Droid finally introduces support for the API introduced in Android 12, asspotted by Mishaal Rahman on X. This makes it possible to install updates fully in the background, without any user interaction required. Naturally, this only works for apps originally installed via F-Droid. With this change in place, F-Droid can be an even more viable alternative to the Play Store and other pre-installed apps for people who want to rely on thebest open source Android apps.
In the past, F-Droid had to rely on a helper app with root access to install updates in the background without disturbing the user, the F-Droid Privileged Extension. With the app now using the unattended updates API, this is no longer necessary.
Inits blog post, F-Droid emphasizes that it wants to ensure that the experience with it is as stable as possible, so version 1.19 isn’t marked as the suggested version yet. It may still have some bugs, so the project is taking a slow approach to the rollout. If you’re brave enough and you already have F-Droid on your phone, you need to enable beta updates to get it straight away. You can alsoinstall it from the F-Droid website.
