Same here in western Europe though, the screenshots take forever (they often never load) and icon caching would be welcome as well.

Personally I just look for apps elsewhere and install them through F-Droid when available (like Telegram, Firefox (fennec), piggybudget, OsmAnd, reddit reader, Öffi, K-9 mail, Newpipe, ssh connectbot, wifi analyzer, simple file manager & gallery, QR code scanner, muPDF viewer, etc. I all have through f-droid instead of the google ecosystem). The only exception is the "new" section that opens by default when you launch the F-Droid app: there I browse when there is new stuff.

Aurora Droid and Aurora Store are sleek alternatives for the F-Droid and Google Play clients. They use the same sources for content, but the apps feel much snappier and look pleasant.

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.adroid/

[2] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.aurora.store/

Not sure about Aurora Droid but the Aurora store wont have the same build guarantees that come with using fdroid. Something to note. Installing malware through a proxy is still installing malware.

Aurora Droid comes with a customizable list of package repositories, including an F-Droid repository mirror.

Aurora Store fetches packages from the same source as the Google Play client. There's a legitimate benefit to having access to the Google Play catalog without depending on Google Play Services or owning a Google account, and not all apps on Google Play are malware.

> There's a legitimate benefit to having access to the Google Play catalog without depending on Google Play Services or owning a Google account

Definitely agree, use store personally, have done all that is possible to degoogle my phone but the reality is that certain play store apps are essential for modern living. Yalp was once good but find it unusable now. Aurora store has good UI and seems to handle the proxy accounts better, or at least they are not being banned so quick.

Are you using some Stallmanesque definition of malware ? Because otherwise, it's not clear what you are trying to say. Aurora droid/store are frontends to f-droid/gplay. They are open source themselves and don't do anything in the malware dept.

Other than the speed, I have problems with the interface. Search is virtually useless (sometimes returns nothing, sometimes too many results in a somewhat random order), and the information for every app is usually lacking. No reviews or rating system either so you just have to install things first to check out if it's really for you or not. There is not even a popularity indicator...

All in all, it's far cry from what a "best in class" app store could be.

>whatever CDN they use

They don't use one AFAIK. They have mirrors, but the way stuff works is that their main server is still the bottleneck. This has been raised before (https://forum.f-droid.org/t/why-is-fdroid-down-all-the-time/... and a few other threads on the forum) without a satisfactory resolution. As an outsider, to me it appears that f-droid's user base is mostly European, and it works well enough for people in Europe.

Central European here: the browsing experience in the app is absolutely miserable here too. I don't remember the last time I saw an app icon in the official client.

F-Droid makes its metadata human-readable: https://f-droid.org/en/2019/09/11/yaml-metadata.html

To help find apps here is a 3-line script to produce a tab-separated list of apks with one line descriptions

    curl -4o name https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/raw/master/stats/known_apks.txt
    curl https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/archive/master/fdroiddata-master.tar.bz2?path=metadata| bzip2 -dc|tar xOf - --wildcards *en-US/summary.txt|sed '/^In the list of classes/d' > desc
    paste name desc|cut -d / -f3,5|less

This one-line script outputs a 1.4M list of longer descriptions found in the YAML files

    curl https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/archive/master/fdroiddata-master.tar.bz2?path=metadata| bzip2 -dc|tar xOf - --wildcards *.yml|sed -n '/AutoName:/p;/./{/Description:/,/versionCode:/{/^   /p;#thats 3 spaces;};}'|less

This outputs list of latest apks

    curl https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/blob/master/stats/latestapps.txt

Because the website has always been so slow, almost unsuable for search or browsing, I download text and make lists of the F-Droid apks with descriptions and other metadata. Then I can browse and search through these text files to find apps using less(1), grep(1), etc., instead of using the website or F-Droid app.

Then when I know what I want I download the source or .apk file from the website. It's a slow website but it's a good project otherwise. Appears they are funded by same organization that wrote libldns, nsd, unbound, drill, etc.

If you look at the older versions of FDroid before they made it "modern", it is much better at categorizing and being able to find apps.

versions after 0.102.3 were just terrible and i reverted immediately. Of course a lot of folks don't seem to mind the modern view but I find itv extremely unusable.

Supposedly a clone called GDroid shows ratings and such as well.

If you're not getting icons and screenshots, that most likely because your data/wifi settings are set to not download them. For example, if you never/rarely use WiFi, and your data/wifi settings are set to only allow downloading over WiFi, it won't download the icons or screenshots. Originally, we had same defaults for everyone, then we updated it so that if you started F-Droid without WiFi on, then it would always allow downloads over data.

That said, yes, the official client could be improved, and we welcome contributions. The security side of F-Droid is quite solid, that's the problem with the various forks. They focus on UX, without the careful attention needed for security. The ideal world would be that the core of the official F-Droid client would be a standalone library, so that the forks can have the same solid base. We welcome contributions there.

I haven't investigated too much but it might be/have been an issue with the app itself, alternative clients such as G-Droid[0] don't have this issue at all and I've experienced this issue inconsistency.

Looking at their bug reports the issue may have been fixed, and anecdotally I haven't had any issues recently.

[0]: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.gdroid.gdroid/ [1]: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/issues?scope=all&utf8...

I used to have the issue with icons refusing to load at all, but now they are loading, it is just very slow.

What's your experience with the third party clients that you've been linked? It may be worth submitting another bug report if they don't have these issues.

Same in Canada... It just does not work well.

Ditto. Seems less of a location problem at this point.

> I know it is open source and I should not complain.

Nah, you should complain. Open source is not an excuse for broken functionality.

It's an opportunity to actually improve it.

I use it from India and it works smoothly.

Same in the US.

Wait, there are screenshots?