We just released version 1.16 of the official F-Droid client app for
Android which includes many radical changes under the hood as well as many
bug fixes for long standing issue. Read on for more details.

Growing repository size

As more and more apps make their way into F-Droid, the official repository
index that includes all apps and their metadata also keeps growing.
Currently, the size of the compressed index is 8 MB which is 33 MB
uncompressed. When updating the repository index, each F-Droid client app
has to download and process those 8MB again and again. This problematic
trend became apparent a long time
ago.

Updating only what has changed

Our repository index is in JSON format and we decided to make use of RFC
7396 JSON Merge Patch to
create much smaller JSON files that only contain the changes since your
F-Droid app last updated. Technically, this works by downloading a new
entry.json file instead of the full
index. This entry file points to the full index in case the app had never
updated before and needs all app metadata anyway. But the