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News from the first half of 2025: RB work, Download Statistics, and more

It’s been half a year since our last blog post – time for an update! Our team is still pretty small, but the changes and achievements are rather big! Let’s start with a brief overview, and then go to the details:

• we’ve got a Grant from NLnet/NGI Mobifree which allows us to spend more time on important tasks
• much work has been done on our Reproducible Builds
• we now not only have Download Statistics – but also nice visualization for them!
• many hours were spent on repository overhaul – though that is far from being complete
• a lot of maintenance work has to be done every day, much time goes into this. We could need some help there…
• some things might seem minor, but still have their effects

NLnet/NGI Mobifree Grant

In the first quarter of 2025, we we received a grant from NGI Mobifree via NLnet. This allows Izzy to take away a full day per week from his $dayjob to spend on improvements to our frameworks and tools – as well as other contributors to work on things and get rewarded for their work. First milestones are near their completion, like the work on our Reproducible Builds framework, and on our Download Statistics including their visualization. Others are still in their early phase; as we usually only announce what we’re ready to deliver, those will be mentioned later.

Reproducible Builds

These went live publicly on August 1st, 2024. Almost exactly one year later, coverage reached 50% on July 16th, 2025 – which means that (more than) every second app in our repo is now confirmed as reproducible build!

Apart from that, and thanks to the NGI Mobifree Grant, we were able to greatly improve our RB framework. And as we’re talking FOSS here, it of course is available to everyone who wants to use it – be it to run a verification builder and chime in as „independent“ – or just to build your own app(s) while matching our setup, increasing your chances of having it/them confirmed as RB here. For this purpose, we have

• forked the original (and meanwhile archived) RBTLOG, added some new features (like support for self-hosted Forgejo/Gitea/GitLab), maintaining it, and making it available here
• forked & maintain gradlew.py and gradle-wrapper-verify, which are needed by rbtlog
• created rbhelper to make it easier to operate a builder and debug failed RBs
• created rbuilder_setup to make setting up your own builder a breeze (takes less than 5 minutes, including you marking in the config which pieces you want, and supports Debian, RPM, and Arch – as well as their derivatives)
• set up several wiki pages on Reproducible Builds – to help developers taking the right measures to have their apps not break on RB, as well as giving information on how to debug failed RBs, and more

We’ve got visualization for this, in multiple forms, by a contributor from outside: Ben has set up a site providing shields developers can include with their Codeberg/GitLab/Github/self-hosted Readmes to show the RB status of their apps, nicely linking to details; further improvements planned there.

On our way to all this, we’ve been mentioned in almost each of the monthly news at reproducible-builds.org, while accomplishing step by step of our RB tasks. This milestone now is nearly completed, its last task is in progress already: expect support in our clients, Droidify and Neo Store, to become available soon – so you can see the apps’ RB status directly there. This is already implemented, just waiting for the next release!

This was a lot of work. You probably think of enormous amounts of grant money for that. To be transparent: EUR 5,000 were assigned to all the above, and shared among the contributors the same way we shared our workload. It were five Tasks in this milestone; for two we spent much more time than original estimated (so they included big chunks of „unpaid work“), one was a little „over limit“, one a spot-landing – and the last one is not yet completed. Plus we probably forgot to record a lot of time spent at research, documentation, testing, etc … Time spent officially: 100 hours. Time spend de facto: probably twice as much. Counting in the regular daily work on checking/fixing RBs: square it, at least (would be half as much if all app developers at least stuck to what we call „the first basic rule“: „Always build the APK from a clean tree at the commit your release tag points to“, see our hints on reproducible builds for app developers) …

Thanks to all contributors here! In alphabetical order, especially:

• Ben: shields and in-the-works „RB Dashboard“ (independent contribution not part of the Grant work)
• Izzy: forking/updating/maintaining all the above mentioned Git repositories, creating the setup scripts, documentation, wiki pages, helper packages
• LooKeR: Arch support for rbuilder_setup, and of course client work on Droidify
• machiav3lli: client work for Neo Store & Droidify
• Sylvia: Setting up Woodpecker at our Codeberg repos, to help automating tasks like dependency updates; improvements to rbtlog (support for self-hosted forges), and a lot of „background SysOp work“

Download Statistics

This is probably the most visible part of our work in the last half year. Also covered by the Mobifree Grant, this also involved most of our team, and even beyond! So let’s put the credit roll first here, this time in reverse alphabetical order:

• Sylvia spent a lot of work and energy in setting up the deployment, using Docker, Ansible, Woodpecker and many more tools. She also provided the Python scripts to parse the download statistic data from our web server logs, see iodstats, to provide similar features to those who want to run their own for their website, see iod-stats-builder, the iod-stats-collector to combine statistics from multiple servers (yes, we have mirrors we want to include in the future!)
• machiav3lli was working on the „front end“ you see when digging into our download statistics, which you can find at iod-stats-viz – it’s „viz“ for „VIsualiZer“, not „wiz“ for „wizzard“). Ben joined in there a bit as well, and the rest of us was looking what we could „complain“ about could need improvement or fine-tuning.
• Izzy worked on the iodstats parser, providing a wrapper that sped up processing by factor 20 (the factor sounds impressive, but my work on that was rather little: just using grep to pre-select relevant entries from the server logs, instead of feeding the full log to the parser). Izzy’s work also entailed the „stuff around it“: taking care results are provided via the Git repo correctly.
• Bene originally started work here; his parallel project was moved to another milestone in favor of machiav3lli’s. His work is mainly supporting developers who want to show some statistics with their website/Readmes – so if that’s you, head over to iod-stats-python!

This already listed our work on the software side now. What else happened behind the scenes? First, we’ve registered the IzzyOnDroid.Org domain. All new work will finally end up there somehow – the download statistics are just the first piece. In our new Download Statistics Dashboard you now can dig in and see:

• which are the most popular clients used to install apps from IzzyOnDroid
• what are the top downloaded apps – by total downloads, or even by client; raw numbers, and percentage
• what are the trends for your favorite apps; all in all, and again also by client
• what are the trends for each client in general, or the IzzyOnDroid repo altogether

Each section with clear numbers, and you can narrow/broaden to the timeframe you’re interested in. The real numbers are higher, as our mirrors are not yet accounted for. But I’m really excited what our team accomplished there! Visualization in the clients is planned for later™ – no ETA yet.

As stated at the beginning of this section, this work again was covered by our Grant from NGI Mobifree. Sum was about the same as with the Reproducible Builds above – and the amount of work (and time) going into it, was comparable as well. And still is, as work on this is not yet completed (see: clients).

Repository Overhaul

And now for something completely different: this is a rather invisible part for most of you, and you’re unlikely to have noticed much from it. Still, many hours of hard work went into this area.

First, and most important: for each app in the IzzyOnDroid repo, we now maintain a local clone of its source repository. You might wonder why, as we’re known to distribute the APKs built and signed by the resp. developers. One main reason is: what are the implications when an app’s repository disappears? Yes, the app gets the NoSourceSince flag here. But there’s more required: if we want to continue shipping the app, we must produce its source code when asked for – libre licenses require that. So until recently, we would have needed to remove such an app from our repository. Now we can keep it (if it makes sense).

But „legalese“ is not the only thing here. Now the clones were set up and working, there’s less dependency on „remote work“. So the next part of the repository overhaul was to process Fastlane metadata locally. We do pre-process it for optimal results, e.g. supporting Markdown. Also, images are resized and optimized (we still have those of you in mind who are on slow networks, short dataplans, or not using „flagship devices“). All this is now done locally by default – no more walking the APIs of the forges. This speeds up processing for apps having many locales in their fastlane tree: some of those took more than 3 minutes to have their Fastlane data updated here; now it’s 20 seconds for those.

Then there’s our monthly quality checker, watching out for repositories that were renamed, archived, had their licenses changed, issue tracker opened, Fastlane added, etc. One run took more than 13 hours until a month ago, running into several API limits. Most of those calls came from parsing the Fastlane trees – so you guess it: these parts happen locally now as well. Less network traffic, less bandwidth used – resources saved. And time: one run now takes about 20 minutes, instead of 13 hours!

Much more work is pending to be done. As usual, we’ll report that when it can be delivered: „you shall judge them by their deeds“. Good intentions are well and all, but you cannot eat the menu paper (well, at least it won’t satisfy you if you try).

Repository overhaul work was (and still is) done by Izzy.

Maintenance work

Daily maintenance work meanwhile takes a lot of time. For me (Izzy), this means full 5 hours a day, which leaves me not much free time for myself. I cannot spend more time on top of this, as I also have to do some work for a living – I’d gladly take some more time from my paid work, if the pay would be covered (same goes for each team member running „extra shifts“ of course. While our team gladly spends time on IzzyOnDroid voluntarily, getting paid for the work done allows more time to be spent on IzzyOnDroid and shows the community’s appreciation for our work ). So we’d welcome your support here, if you can afford it: a „buck“ per months sums up if many send one – the more bucks, the more can be done. And seeing what we’ve accomplished so far: imagine what could be!

Preferred channel for this is Our OpenCollective, also for transparency. It shall not be said we just want to „sack money“. For alternative channels, be welcome to reach out to us.

Contributions via OpenCollective do not necessarily require an account there. You can also contribute as guest. To do so, simply visit our Contribute page and choose „Custom Contribution“ (or use this direct link to it). Select the amount you wish to contribute, enter a valid email address for the receipt, and select a payment method.

That said: a big „Thank You!“ to all those already supporting us this way! We took little off the OpenCollective account yet, as we want to ensure we have some „backings“ for „hard times” and eventualities. The savings there are still rather small, so we only dared using them on small things…

Miscellaneous

Thanks to suggestions and help from Wolfshappen, we implemented a few small improvements on accessibility to our repo browser. Most of the „abled people“ will not have noticed it, as those changes are rather subtle and sometimes not even visible – but we hope that our visibly impaired visitors have their experience (at least slightly) improved. These changes include minor contrast improvements, but also attributes to help screen readers. Affected was mostly the app list.

Oh, and for those not yet aware of it: you can find all the tools we’ve built so far, as well as those we will build in the future, at Codeberg.Org. We’d like to thank the Codeberg team for their support, help, and all their hard work not just for/with us, but for providing such an excellent service to all of you, from the depth of our hearts! Without them, we’d not be where we are today. Libre software needs a libre forge, a libre home – thanks, dear Codeberg team, for providing that! And of course also for running one of our mirrors