F-Droid due to them not properly maintaining their app and targeting a multi-year old SDK cannot use the unattended updates functionality of Android 12+. You will need to use a 3rd party client if you absolutely must use the F-Droid service despite their poor practices. Some users use an Alpha release of https://github.com/NeoApplications/Neo-Store to do so.

    Kenny33 as [deleted] said use github to get apps direct and a an RSS reader like Feeder and append .atom to the release page URL for update notifications.

      flawedworld Thanks for the explanation. I have no strong opinions regarding F-Droid, except that the lack of auto-updates are annoying. It does, however, have a large repository of apps that are generally free from ads and permission bloat.

      Thanks for the tip to use Neo store. Does using an alpha release of it entail building from source? The lastest release I see is 0.4.3 from Dec 20, 2021, which doesn't appear to update my existing apps automatically.

      MetropleX While this bypasses F-Droid, it still requires manual intervention for updates, right?

        Cloud It uses API level 32. Currently, you need to manually hit the update button (though you wont need to confirm the update after you have updated an app with the store once). The next release will have seamless automatic updates.

          Cloud They publish the alpha/beta builds on their Telegram.

          The Github releases method does require you to manually monitor, download, and update your apps, so that is not ideal, but it can be a better than solution than F-droid, as F-droid has many issues.

          A GrapheneOS community member is creating a new app store that's focused on privacy and security which will have unattended updates called Accrescent. It is currently in early stages, but is actively being developed, so that's definitely something to look out for.

          Additionally, keep in mind that the GrapheneOS team plans to eventually do their own builds of 3rd party open source applications that will be downloadable from the "Apps" application that comes pre-installed on GrapheneOS, so that's also something to look out for in the future as another option with unattended updates!

            Arnauld That's correct. It's in a pre-alpha stage right now. It's something to look out for once it's ready and it actually opens up for developers to be able to submit apps to it.

            For now it's just a project to keep on your radar. ;-)

              Arnauld Neo Store has the same apps as F-droid. It also has 3rd party repositories that you can enable built-in within the app, but those can also be added on the official F-droid client as well.

                So, just for me to understand, there is a general consensus against using F-Droid at all? Because I believed to this day, that F-Droid is the holy grail of FOSS and security.

                  tpax It's up to you whether you use F-Droid, but it has significant security issues in comparison to other methods of obtaining apps and isn't really recommended. For reference, https://wonderfall.dev/fdroid-issues/.

                  If you do use F-Droid I would suggest using Droid-ify/NeoStore as a client instead of the official one to mitigate some of its problems.

                  tpax For apps which have the same functionality on F-Droid and Play Store, I prefer Play Store (or Aurora Store). Some apps have a slightly different feature set on F-Droid, because there are features which are not allowed on Play Store. In that case I use Neo Store with the developer's repository or in case that's not available from the izzyondroid repo. In the latter case, I double check if the APK is truly from the developer's GitHub.

                    5 days later

                    Alright so I gave this some thought because it turns out I do have to use some apps from the f-droid repository.
                    This is not a solution to the problem of f-droid not having a feed which people can use to get notified about updates.
                    This may only work for apps on GitHub as I don't know how/whether other version control systems implement support for RSS/Atom feed.
                    It's pretty straightforward. Subscribe to the GitHub repository from which f-droid builds. (Ideally the developer themselves would provide a release APK.) Create a Calendar/Task management app entry to keep track of it periodically to see when f-droid releases it's update.
                    This is quite cumbersome but at least it mitigates some of the problem. And it is really not worth installing a whole-ass app store to get updates for 2 apps. So hope this long-winding insubstantial "solution" helps someone lol