Donations are a key part of what keeps F-Droid independent and reliable and our latest hardware update is a direct result of your support. Thanks to donations from our incredible community, F-Droid has replaced one of its most critical pieces of infrastructure, our core server hardware. It was overdue for a refresh, and now we are happy to give you an update on the new server and how it impacts the project.
This upgrade touches a core part of the infrastructure that builds and publishes apps for the main F-Droid repository. If the server is slow, everything downstream gets slower too. If it is healthy, the entire ecosystem benefits.
Why did we wait?
This server replacement took a bit longer than we would have liked. The biggest reason is that sourcing reliable parts right now is genuinely hard. Ongoing global trade tensions have made supply chains unpredictable, and that hit the specific components we needed. We had to wait for quotes, review, replan, and wait again when quotes turned out to have unexpected long waits, before we finally managed to receive hardware that met our requirements.
Even with the delays, the priority never changed. We were looking for the right server set up for F-Droid, built to last for the long haul.
A note about the host
Another important part of this story is where the server lives and how it is managed. F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodity hardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a special arrangement so that this server is physically held by a long time contributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We can control it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who has access. That level of transparency and trust is not common in infrastructure, but it is central to how we think about resilience and stewardship.
This was not the easiest path, and it required careful coordination and negotiation. But we are glad we did it this way. It fits our values and our threat model, and it keeps the project grounded in real people rather than anonymous systems.
Old hardware, new momentum
The previous server was 12 year old hardware and had been running for about five years. In infrastructure terms, that is a lifetime. It served F-Droid well, but it was reaching the point where speed and maintenance overhead were becoming a daily burden.
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