You probably "just" need to pull down while on the "Latest" or "Updates" tab, to update your repository (it will show a small banner at the top while it's doing that). It's incremental, so it may take a while if it has been some time since you last did it (and auto-updates are disabled).
The way F-Droid works is that it downloads the whole index and then the catalog, version checks, etc, all runs locally, quite similarly to some package repositories actually.
I am not claiming its intuitive, but I think that part works fine once you understand how it works.
F-Droid builds all apps by themselves, which especially with their old servers took a lot (between detecting that the update exists, building the app and going to sign everything at their air-gapped signing computer).
Now a lot of apps use the "reproducible builds" feature, which means that F-Droid will distribuite them as they come from the author, leaving its digital signature; but they still need to build them before distributing them, to verify that what the author built corresponds to the declared source code.
With the much powerful servers that they've had for a few months builds are a lot quicker, but there are still steps that can take several days, especially the part of signing the apps' index on their air-gapped computer.
There's a ton of things that could be improved, and it would be best if there were an alternative with better maintainers, but they're currently the only service of this kind for Android (well, IzzyOnDroid is a partial alternative, if you're careful to check their reproducible builds results).
Sounds like an accurate recreation of the Play Store experience to me.
You're sure you understand what it does?
I very much prefer Obtainium these days despite the setup steps. I don't think it's a coincidence that Obtainium, Aurora, Zapstore, etc. are gaining mindshare over F-Droid, just like how Brave has explosive growth over FF.
We search for stuff, install it, it updates in the background. We install some of our own repos, but the bulk of our apps come from F-Droid's default repos.
Hard to reconcile your account with my experience without specifics.
https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater
though personally I use it only for Fdroid, Gitlab and Github
And yeah the iris scans sound like a scare but only 2 years ago there was a constant line of zombies here in the shopping mall giving their eye scans to altman.
The masses really don't care about privacy if you give them a worthless trinket.
For instance, I use GrapheneOS because it provides better security and privacy out of the box than LineageOS, but I'm also not so paranoid that I'm going to just blindly listen to advice against using F-Droid. What I want out of my Android instance is good security defaults with no bloatware, not to stop the NSA from looking at my travel photos and what HN articles I once looked at. It's okay if my OS is great but not perfect.
So yes, I am a GrapheneOS user who is [modestly] hurt by this. Signing in with a dummy account is just another one of those things that will end up being futile in years to come when Google requires iris scans, DNA samples, and anal probes in order to get a new account. Personally, I'd prefer installing whatever software I want on whatever devices I [pretend like] I own, without telemetry or jumping through hoops.