F Droid

This wiki page is maintained by the Signal user community. The information below may be inaccurate and should not be interpreted as an official statement by the Signal team.

Signal Android app on F-Droid store / F-Droid status

The Signal Android app is currently not available through the main F-Droid repository and Signal does not maintain its own F-Droid repository. People who are not able to install Signal through the Google Play Store can download a self-updating APK directly from Signal's website:

• https://signal.org/android/apk/

The APK is designed to use Google Play Services if they are available on your device. If the app can not detect Google Play Services during registration, it will automatically fall back on using a WebSocket for notifications.

The APK is also designed to automatically download the next available update if your device is connected to a Wi-Fi network. All you need to do is tap a notification about the update and then tap Install. (The ability to choose whether to download the updates over mobile data has been requested here.)

Historically, Signal’s developers have not wanted to distribute their app through F-Droid for a couple of reasons:

1. Installing apps from third-party app stores like F-Droid requires people to enable "unknown sources". Signal's developers feel that normalizing this kind of behavior would be "a reversion back to the desktop security model" and that endorsing it through participation would be harmful. The only reason they distribute an APK outside of the Play Store is to reduce the harm of non-technical people installing fake apps instead.

2. Most of the apps on F-Droid are not signed by the developers who created the apps. Signal's developers have said that they want to continue signing their releases with their own keys, which means that they would have to maintain an independent F-Droid repository. People would then need to know about the repository in order to add it, at which point they might as well install the Signal APK directly. At that point, all they would be getting from F-Droid is an update mechanism, which Signal's developers have already built into the Signal APK.

When asked for permission to distribute a custom build of the Signal Android app through an unofficial F-Droid repository, Signal's developers have previously said:

Concerning F-Droid, we already providing an auto-updating APK directly from our site [sic], and we really don't want forked versions of the app maintained by other parties connecting to our servers. Not only could the users using the forked version have a subpar experience, but the people they're talking to (using official clients) could also have a subpar experience (for example, an official client could try to send a new kind of message that the fork, having fallen out of date, doesn't support). I know you say you'd advocate for a build expiry, but you know how things go. Of course you have our full support if you'd like to fork Signal, name it something else, and use your own servers.

Please note that Signal only uses GitHub issues to keep track of bug reports. Questions, comments, and feature request belong on the Signal Community Forum: https://community.signalusers.org

Issue within F-Droid RFP tracker ref https://gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/issues/451