Donations are a key part of what keeps F-Droid independent and reliable andour latest hardware update is a direct result of your support. Thanks todonations from our incredible community, F-Droid has replaced one of itsmost critical pieces of infrastructure, our core server hardware. It wasoverdue for a refresh, and now we are happy to give you an update on the newserver and how it impacts the project.This upgrade touches a core part of the infrastructure that builds andpublishes apps for the main F-Droid repository. If the server is slow,everything downstream gets slower too. If it is healthy, the entireecosystem benefits.Why did we wait?This server replacement took a bit longer than we would have liked. Thebiggest reason is that sourcing reliable parts right now is genuinelyhard. Ongoing global trade tensions have made supply chains unpredictable,and that hit the specific components we needed. We had to wait for quotes,review, replan, and wait again when quotes turned out to have unexpectedlong waits, before we finally managed to receive hardware that met ourrequirements.Even with the delays, the priority never changed. We were looking for theright server set up for F-Droid, built to last for the long haul.A note about the hostAnother important part of this story is where the server lives and how it ismanaged. F-Droid is not hosted in just any data center where commodityhardware is managed by some unknown staff. We worked out a specialarrangement so that this server is physically held by a long timecontributor with a proven track record of securely hosting services. We cancontrol it remotely, we know exactly where it is, and we know who hasaccess. That level of transparency and trust is not common ininfrastructure, but it is central to how we think about resilience andstewardship.This was not the easiest path, and it required careful coordination andnegotiation. But we are glad we did it this way. It fits our values and ourthreat model, and it keeps the project grounded in real people rather thananonymous systems.Old hardware, new momentumThe previous server was 12 year old hardware and had been running for aboutfive years. In infrastructure terms, that is a lifetime. It served F-Droidwell, but it was reaching the point where speed and maintenance overheadwere becoming a daily burden.The new system is already showing a huge improvement. Stats of the runningcycles from the last two months suggest it can handle the full build andpublish actions much faster than before. E.g. this year, between January andSeptember, we published updates once every 3 or 4 days, that got down toonce every 2 days in October, to every day in November and it’s reachingtwice a day in December. (You can see this in the frequency of indexpublishing after October 18, 2025 in our f-droid.org transparencylog).That extra capacity gives us more breathing room and helps shorten the gapbetween when apps are updated and when those updates reach users. We can nowbuild all the auto-updatedapps in the(UTC) morning in one cycle, and all the newly included apps, fixed appsand manually updated apps, through the day, in the evening cycle.We are being careful here, because real world infrastructure always comeswith surprises. But the performance gains are real, and they are exciting.What donations make possibleThis upgrade exists because of community support, pooled over time, turnedinto real infrastructure, benefiting everyone who relies on F-Droid.A faster server does not just make our lives easier. It helps developers gettimely builds. It reduces maintenance risk. It strengthens the health of theentire repository.So thank you. Every donation, whether largeor small, is part of how this project stays reliable, independent, andaligned with free software values.