> never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app. The other half of the time even when I did get something installed, it would just never understand that an update existed and needed to download and update a given app

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.

Yeah, the experience isn't great and there are better alternatives but F-Droid was there before anything else existed. It's also great to just have it as an option.

Doesn't match my experience (or anyone I know that uses F-Droid), FWIW.

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.

My understanding is that F-Droid is hosted out of some home servers (instead of some universities like other similar package managers) so the bandwidth leaves much to be desired. But the UX is definitely a big part of the problem. I don't understand why it tends to abort downloads when I background it, and I don't understand why it doesn't show a toast that it aborted the download.

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.

Try using the Droid-ify client: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.looker.droidify/

Have you tried Neo Store for accessing F-Droid and other repositories? In particular, I use the IzzyOnDroid F-Droid and Guardian Project repos.

> Every time I've tried to use it (as recently as half a year ago) it's still a shitshow and never displays or updates apps correctly. Half the time an app showed up on the website that didn't show up on the phone app.

Sounds like an accurate recreation of the Play Store experience to me.

The software and many parts of the project are bad, but I don't see how you can't understand its reason to exist.

You're sure you understand what it does?