Obtainium: F-Droid Alternative

Since my first smartphone I’ve acquired 99% of my apps from F-Droid. This works fine and I really appreciate that project, but there are some things that drives me crazy now and then. One example is the build process. Usually it takes a few days for an update to reach F-Droid, sometimes more than that. This can be critical depending on app and kind of update.

Obtainium

Obtainium comes to rescue. I found this project a while ago and I love it. With Obtainium you download the APKs straight from the source, meaning you don’t have to wait for F-Droid to build the app for you…in most cases. The thing is that the developer of the app you want to donwload have to offer an APK from somewhere to download, either from the git repository or from a website. In the cases where they don’t you can also supply the F-Droid APK, which is really neat, but in those cases you wont be able to avoid the F-Droid build process.

They also provide a site where you can add Crowdsourced app configurations for popular apps to Obtainium.

No more F-Droid

I’ve moved most of my installed apps to Obtainium now and using that almost exclusively. I still have F-Droid installed on my phone to be able to browse for apps, but I do download and install everything via Obtainium.

It’s a very neat app. You can read up more on it on their Github, website and their wiki.