F-Droid, the alternative Android app store that only offers free and open source apps, has been changed to Warehouse format Which makes retrieving the list of available apps and their details much faster.

Torsten Grote, Sun contributors from F-Droid, reports The warehouse size became an issue. “Currently, the compressed index is 8MB, which is 33MB uncompressed. Each client must download and process 8MB at a time. This problematic trend has been around for some time.”

As of F-Droid version 1.16, things are different. The repo index, which uses the JSON format, now uses the Merge patch originally released in 2014. The entire index can still be downloaded afterward, but it also contains references to differenceThe files can be downloaded separately. At the time of writing, the latest difference is 80KB compressed and 241KB uncompressed. The result is that F-Droid “updates” faster, because it requires less bandwidth and less processing power.

Third party F-Droid repository administrators can update to the latest version of fdroidserver and the repository will be built in the new style. The old format is also retained to accommodate an older clientele.

Furthermore, Grote reports that there is better mirror support to ease the main server. Devices with little RAM should also be able to run this version better, because the index is stored from storage flow They are read instead of being completely loaded into working memory.

F-Droid offers not only open source software, but also feedback “counter features” in applications. Examples include advertising, tracking, vulnerability, and partial use of proprietary code. Some well-known applications, such as VLC, Nextcloud, DuckDuckGo, Proton Mail, Telegram, and Wireguard, can be found on F-Droid. No login required to use.