F-Droid Upgrades Hardware as Google Moves to End Anonymous Sideloading

F-Droid is upgrading its hardware, after disclosing that it was in the process of acquiring new servers to replace its ageing infrastructure. The current machines have been running for twelve years and are severely overburdened, with a legacy CPU stack unable to handle newer instruction sets such as SSE4.1 and SSSE3, which caused many library builds to fail in early August 2025.

Although plans to procure new servers had been in place for some time, global trade tensions and rising prices for memory and other components delayed progress, before a new server is now hosted and operated by a long-time F-Droid contributor. The F-Droid team notes that the contributor has a proven track record in secure hosting, and that remote administrative control remains with the F-Droid team, with full visibility into the server’s location and access permissions.

At the time of publication, the new server had been in production for two months, delivering substantially shorter update-build cycles, while Google’s forthcoming mandatory developer certification, planned from 2026 in certain regions, could affect sideloading of non-Google Play apps. according to the F-Droid team.