The IzzyOnDroid Repository celebrates its 10th anniversary!

IzzyOnDroid has its 10^th anniversary – time to celebrate!

Conceptual image - success of teamwork
© Vic (CC-BY); Source: Flickr

While its activities go much further back, being based on a „pet project“ of its founder (Izzy), 2016-03-21 23:07 is the recorded timestamp of the first git commit to the repository of its „repo browser“. Started as a one-man-show, IzzyOnDroid is meanwhile (since 11/2023) a team. And look what we have achieved since – just in those 2 years as a team:

our repository covers more than 1.300 apps
monitoring was added to our services, so you now can easily check if something is hanging
additional checks have been implemented, to increase security
we´re now providing Reproducible Builds, which (at the time of this writing) cover more than 850 (or around 64%) of the apps in our repository
Download Statistics became available, and were meanwhile also implemented in most of the Android clients: Droid-ify, Flicky, Florid, and Neo Store have them
our reviews for App Inclusion Requests are now public in the same repo hosting the apps´ metadata – so you can see for yourself what care we take. You can also participate there!

IzzyOnDroid is the second largest repository (or „app store“, if you want to call it that) for F/LOSS Android apps. You can use it with any F-Droid client of your choice. And many people from all over the world do so: according to our web server statistics, about 300.000 visitors make around 3 million hits each day. And that´s not even counting our mirrors!

Credits

Credits where credits are due: much of our work would not have been possible without „external support“. So at this point, we want to give our special thanks to:

NLnet, who enabled us to establish mentioned download statistics, the rewrite of our APK scanner, work on improving our RB tools, and more, with a grant via NGI Mobifree
We received some code contributions from the community – thanks to those contributors!
Some of you help us covering our costs by contributing to our OpenCollective or Liberapay. Thank you so much! Please, keep it up – and if you´re not doing so already, consider joining them!

Apart from the NLnet grant, all our work is done by volunteers in their free time. Some of them spend several hours each day on maintenance work. Your contributions help to keep them afloat and able to continue:

Contributing

Contributing to the IzzyOnDroid repository has become much easier, now that our new home at Codeberg has been fully established. You can e.g. help out with app reviews (the repository´s wiki has some helpful snippets for that), report broken apps (so we can keep our repository clean and useful), or suggest apps for inclusion. You can also help out on any of our other repositories. Or you can support us financially, e.g. via our OpenCollective or Liberapay. Find out more details on our Contributing page.

Thanks!

Thanks to NLnet for their funding, and their patience with us! It was a lovely experience working with you, which we hope to continue with future projects. Gerben, Marc, Michiel… we´d love to work with you again!

Thanks to all our contributors – code-wise and financial! Thanks to all you lovely folks who have put your trust into us by using our repository! Thanks to those who have sent us a „Thank you“ in form of a toot, a mail, a comment in issues! You all give us motivation to keep going.

Thanks also to our wonderful partners on this journey: the developers of Droid-ify and Neo Store, working closely with us, giving us inspiration and even helping us on our chores. To Jon from BlissLabs, our financial host at OpenCollective, who proved to be the best we could have chosen. To our friends from SHIFT – always at our side, even helping us out with their wonderful modular phones (yes, half of our team runs at least one of them – that´s also what we use for the on-device-tests with our app reviews).

The past two years were packed with work, pretty much „overloading“ our entire team. Quite stressful at times. But you all kept us going!

IzzyOnDroid Milestones

IzzyOnDroid Milestones 2016-2026
(click the graphic for a bigger variant)

2014-04-06 android.izzysoft.de goes live with its app listings
2014-07-15 the blog opens with its first article
2014-08-10 starts the first blog series on Android without Google (8 parts), many more articles & several series follow
2016-03-21 23:07 first code commit for the IzzyOnDroid Repository Browser. Though according to our known_apks.txt, several APKs predate that back to 2014-03-10 – the date recorded was the file timestamp, so we have to take this commit as our „official birthdate“
2016-08-07 first implementations on APK scanning (using LibRadar)
2016-08-12 integrating malware check with VirusTotal
2017-04-23 first deeper dig into modules included with apps, finally leading to IzzyOnDroid´s first APK scanner (introduced with a blog post 2021-01-29)
2017-05-09 first commit on the IzzyOnDroid APK library scanner
2017-12-12 opening of the IzzyOnDroid GitLab repo to allow filing of app inclusion requests and other issues – and also to make our tooling publicly available under a F/LOSS license
2018-01-09 Izzy´s own first blog article introducing the IzzyOnDroid repository (now serving 350+ apps) and its repo browser
2018-12-16 start of the 4-part (with spin-offs, 7-part) blog series on F-Droid, including instructions on how to set up your own repository
2019-02-23 start of the rewrite for the repo update checker from page-scraping to using the forges´ APIs
2020-05-15 per-app size limit gets increased from 20 MB to 30 MB
2021-01-29 the APK library scanner used by IzzyOnDroid is being introduced with a blog post
2023-11-17 IzzyOnDroid becomes a Team
2024-02-xx when apps get established at F-Droid.org, they are no longer automatically removed from IzzyOnDroid
2024-03-08 our monitor goes live
2024-03-22 the first two mirrors get added to the IzzyOnDroid repo
2024-03-25 we publish our increased security measures: in addition to the existing APK library scans, we now also scan the Android Manifest for sensible permissions, flags, and intent filters, the signing certificates, and watch out for „blobs“ in signing blocks
2024-08-01 we go live with our Reproducible Builds
2024-11-22 first independent builder (bg443) gets added to our „RB system“
2025-02-xx NLnet Mobifree Grant to improve our framework
2025-05-12 IzzyOnDroid now keeps a clone of the source code for each app. Following that, Fastlane metadata now get processed from those local clones, instead of online, resulting in a huge speedup of checks etc.
2025-06-xx our Download Statistics go live
2025-07-xx to 2025-12-xx massive upstreaming of our local fastlane metadata to the repositories of the corresponding apps (300+ PRs & MRs across Codeberg, Github, and GitLab)
2025-08-02 RB status gets integrated with clients: Neo Store, and later also with Droid-ify (2026-01-21)
2025-09-06 Download Statistics are integrated with clients: Neo Store – and later also with Droid-ify (2026-01-21), Florid (2026-01-28), and Flicky (2026-02-09)
2025-10-20 the IzzyOnDroid.org website goes live
2026-01-21 our repodata repository goes live, giving more transparency, and allowing developers to update their metadata – replacing the original IzzyOnDroid GitLab repo
2026-01-31 to 2026-02-01 for the first time, IzzyOnDroid has a stand at FOSDEM, shared with our friends from BlissLabs & SHIFT
2026-02-20 the new, refined APK scanner is published to Maven Central. Library definitions will be maintained at apkscanner-data.
2026-03-03 our 3rd mirror gets added
2026-03-12 our monthly reports are ready (currently in their Codeberg repo, but hopefully soon™ moving to a proper „static site“)

Our team, with a „little“ help from our friends…

interna

2026-03-21