Improve UX/UI design
I love the fact F-Droid exists. The choice for smaller but better tech is much needed, especially these days. Even my non-techie friends and family start to recognize this now.
The UX/UI design of the F-Droid app can be better though. The content (the apps and their descriptions) is somewhat hard to grasp and that in itself is fine. Obviously the design should help navigate this complexity, not add to it. My main issue with the current design is that the various list views are quite hard to parse and use. I've made some suggestions for redesigns to illustrate.
Latest
The current 'Latest' screen shows apps in boxes with different sizes in an alternating grid. This makes that the same type of info (icon, title and description) are at different locations constantly. Very hard for the eyes. Another problem is that the boxes have fixed ratios which causes the text being unhelpfully cut off a lot.
In my redesign suggestion all the apps have the same format so scanning them is a lot easier. I've added the category for each app so people have more context of what kind of apps they see listed. I've also added the search bar at the top of the screen. I was genuinely searching for the search functionality myself the first time I used F-Droid..
Categories
The 'Categories' screen lists all categories but to see all categories people have to scroll a lot. The horizontal scrolling within each category I think is a bit awkward. Here again, the boxes for the apps have fixed sizes causing text cut offs, now even for the app names.
My redesign suggestion just shows all the categories in one view so people can quickly navigate to a category of interest and then browse a proper list of all the apps within that category.
Search
The results list on the 'Search' screen if formatted a bit clunky. Titles and descriptions are not at all differentiated. The 'Anti-features' label is closer the next list item which can be confusing. And the different ways of sorting the list is unclear.
In my redesign suggestion I just tried to better format the results list. Titles and descriptions are on separate lines and in different font weights. The 'Anti-features' is moved to the position of where the install button would be, hopefully hinting people this is the reason why the install button is not there. Here too I added the categories so people can quickly judge the relevance of a search result. I also added the two ways of sorting at the top of the list, with a text label so it clear what it does.
Hope all of this can inform any new development regarding the design of the app in the future.