F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs

84•nativeforks•2h ago

On August 7, 2025, a new build problem started hitting many Android apps on F-Droid. Many Android apps on F-Droid have been unable to publish updates if they use Android Gradle Plugin (AGP) 8.12.0 or Gradle 9.0.

The root cause: Google’s new aapt2 binary in AGP 8.12.0 started requiring CPU instructions (SSE4.1, SSSE3) that F-Droid’s build farm hardware doesn’t support. This is similar to a 2021 AGP 4.1.0 issue, but it has returned, and now affects hundreds of apps.

As an example, my open-source app MBCompass hit this issue. I downgraded to AGP 8.11.1 with Gradle 8.13 to make it build, but even then, F-Droid failed due to a baseline profile reproducibility bug in AGP. The only workaround was disabling baseline profiles and pushing yet another release.

This has led to multiple “maintenance” versions in a short time, confusing users and wasting developer time, just to work around infrastructure issues outside the developer’s control.

References:

- F-Droid admin issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/593 - Catima example: https://github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Android/issues/2608 - MBCompass case: https://github.com/CompassMB/MBCompass/issues/88

Comments

nativeforks•1h ago

References:

F-Droid admin issue: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/593

Catima example: https://github.com/CatimaLoyalty/Android/issues/2608

MBCompass case: https://github.com/CompassMB/MBCompass/issues/88

benrutter•1h ago

The Catima thread makes FDroid sound like a really difficult commmunity to work with. Although I'm basing this on one person's comment and other people agreeing, not on any knowledge or experience.

> But this is like everything with F-Droid: everything always falls on a deaf man's ears. So I would rather not waste more time talking to a brick wall. If I had the feeling it was possible to improve F-Droid by raising issues and trying to discuss how to solve them I wouldn't have left the project out of frustration after years of putting so much time and energy into it.

typpilol•16m ago

I saw that too and was wondering what kind of drama happened in the past

trenchpilgrim•1h ago

I thought SSE 4.1 dates back to 2008 or so?

nativeforks•1h ago

Yes, SSE4.1 and SSSE3 have been introduced in ~2006. The F-Droid build server still uses that to build modern and some of the most popular FOSS apps.

starkparker•1h ago

The build servers appear to be AMD Opteron G3s, which only support part of SSE4 (SSE4a). Full SSE4 support didn't land until Bulldozer (late 2011).

karlgkk•1h ago

I appreciate that this is a volunteer project, but my back of the hand math suggests that if they upgraded to a $300 laptop using a 10nm intel chip, it would pay for itself in power usage within a few years. Actually, probably less, considering an i3-N305 has more cores and substantially faster single thread.

And yes, you could get that cost down easily.

wtallis•1h ago

Yes, a used laptop would be an upgrade from server hardware of that vintage, in performance and probably in reliability. If they're really using hardware that old, that is itself a big red flag that F-Droid's infrastructure is fragile and unmaintained.

(A server that old might not have any SSDs, which would be insane for a software build server unless it was doing everything in RAM.)

mrheosuper•14m ago

it's insane, i would give them my old xeon haswell machine for free, but the shipping cost is likely more than the cost of the machine itself.

benrutter•1h ago

This is pretty concerning, especially as FDroid is by far the largest non-google android store at the moment, something that I feel is really needed, regardless of your feelings about google.

Does anyone know of plans to resolve this? Will FDroid update their servers? Are google looking into rolling back the requirement? (this last one sounds unlikely)

dannyw•1h ago

I agree it’s a bit concerning but please keep in mind F-Droid is a volunteer-run community project. Especially with some EU countries moving to open source software, it would be nice to see some public funding for projects like F-Droid.

nativeforks•1h ago

> Nice to see some public funding for projects like F-Droid

Definitely, SSE4.1 instruction set based CPU, for building apps in 2025, No way!!

benrutter•1h ago

Hope I didn't come across as criticising FDroid here- It seems sucky to have build requirements change under your feet.

It's just I think that FDroid is an important project, and hope this doesn't block their progress.

charcircuit•1h ago

>FDroid is by far the largest non-google android store at the moment

Samsung Galaxy Store is much much bigger.

benrutter•1h ago

Yup! I missed that one because I didn't realise it still existed. Woops!

ozim•53m ago

Largest not run by the corporations then ;)

ykonstant•47m ago

Funny true story: I got my first smartphone in 2018, a Samsung Galaxy A5. I have it to this day, and it is the only smartphone I ever used. This is the first time I hear about Samsung Galaxy store! (≧▽≦)

Jyaif•1h ago

> FDroid is by far the largest non-google android store at the moment

Not even sure it's in the top 10

benrutter•28m ago

Wait really? What other ones are there!? Somebody's already pointed out Samsumg Galaxy store, but I don't think I know of others?

Edit: searching online found this if anyone else is interested https://www.androidauthority.com/best-app-stores-936652/

magnio•8m ago

There are at least six Android app stores in China that have more than 100 million MAUs each: Huawei AppGallery, Tencent MyApp, Xiaomi Mi Store (or GetApps), Oppo, Vivo, and Honor stores.

happosai•1h ago

Maybe if f-droid is important to you, donate, so they can buy newer build server?

ratdragon•59m ago

Did and doing regularly.

benrutter•30m ago

I'm not quite sure if I'm overreading into this, but thus comes across as a snarky response as if I've said "boo, fdroid sucks and owes me a free app store!".

Appologis if I came across like that, here's what I'm trying to convey:

- Fdroid is important

- This sounds like a problem, not necessarily one that's any fault of fdroid

- Does anyone know of a plan to fix the issue?

For what it's worth, I dodonate ona monthly basis to fdroid through liberapay, but I don't think that's really relevant here?

nativeforks•19m ago

This has now become a major issue for F-Droid, as well as for FOSS app developers. People are starting to complain about devs because they haven't been able to release the new version for their apps (at least it doesn't show up on F-Droid) as promised

wtallis•1h ago

It seems quite implausible that F-Droid is actually running on hardware that predates those instruction set extensions. They're seeing wider adoption by default these days precisely because hardware which doesn't support them is getting very rare, especially in servers still in production use. Are you sure this isn't simply a matter of F-Droid using VMs that are configured to not expose those instructions as supported?

do_not_redeem•1h ago

Encourage your users to use Obtainium instead. Cut out the middleman.

https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium

qart•1h ago

I have it installed. But the only thing I get updates for is Obtainium itself. There's no catalogue of apps, so I haven't installed anything via Obtainium.

UberFly•1h ago

I would uninstall. Author and app seem sketchy.

user070223•59m ago

Try Discoverium

oguz-ismail•1h ago

How is this not another middleman (with a political banner in its README no less)?

spacemule•57m ago

Wow. That banner slipped by me on first read. Thanks for pointing it out. I tried to go to the dev's webpage, and I needed a VPN to access it. If he actually believed what he said, he wouldn't block IPs, he'd attempt to educate. Seems like bad-faith xenophobia role-playing as compassion.

user070223•54m ago

I think it acts more as an rss feed reader rather than building and hosting apps on it's own.

prmoustache•43m ago

At this point it is not political, the banner mention a fact and a tragedy and link for donations to reputable NGOs.

yjftsjthsd-h•40m ago

Half the point is that I trust this middleman more than the app devs. When app developers turn evil ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505229 ), I explicitly want someone reviewing things and blocking software that works against my interests before it gets to me.

mjevans•1h ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streaming_SIMD_Extensions#Late...

Even my last, crazy long in the tooth, desktop supported this and it lived to almost 10 years old before being replaced.

However at the same time, not even offering a fallback path in non-assembly?

wtallis•1h ago

> However at the same time, not even offering a fallback path in non-assembly?

There's probably not any hand-written assembly at issue here, just a compiler told to target x86_64-v2. Among others, RHEL 9 and derivatives were built with such options. (RHEL 10 bumped up the minimum spec again to x86_64-v3, allowing use of AVX.)

vocx2tx•52m ago

Looking at the issue their builders seem to be Opterons G3 (K10?)[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_10h

exabrial•1h ago

Man, Android could have been way cooler if it actually used real virtual machines, or at least the JVMs.

pjmlp•39m ago

I stood by Oracle, because in the long term as it has been proven, Android is Google's J++, and Kotlin became Google's C#.

Hardly any different from what was in the genesis of .NET.

Nowadays they support up to Java 17 LTS, a subset only as usual, mostly because Android was being left behind accessing the Java ecosystem on Maven central.

And even though now ART is updatable via PlayStore, all the way down to Android 12, they see no need to move beyond Java 17 subset, until most likely they start again missing on key libraries that decided to adopt newer features.

Also stuff like Panama, Loom, Vector, Valhala (if ever), don't count them ever being supported on ART.

At least, they managed to push into mainstream the closest idea of OSes like Oberon, Inferno, Java OS and co, where regardless of what think about the superiotity of UNIX clones, here they have to contend themselves with a managed userspace, something that Microsoft failed at with Longhorn, Singularity and Midori due to their internal politics.

tonyhart7•21m ago

JVM??? hell no, native FTW

o11c•1h ago

Note: the underlying blame here fundamentally belongs to whoever built AGP / Gradle with non-universal flags, then distributed it.

It's fine to ship binaries with hard-coded cpu flag requirements if you control the universe, but otherwise not, especially if you are in an ecosystem where you make it hard for users to rebuild everything from source.

userbinator•1h ago

control the universe

Guess what the company behind Android wants to do...

IshKebab•24m ago

Exactly. Everything should be compiled to target i386.

/s (should be obvious but probably not for this audience)

kijin•1h ago

Requiring (supposedly) universally available CPU instructions is one thing. Starting to require it in a minor version update (8.11.1 -> 8.12.0) is a whole different thing. What the heck happened to semantic versioning? We can't even trust patch updates anymore these days. The version numbers might as well be git commit IDs.

nicman23•1h ago

wtf they cannot be still running opterons. it was to be that they are using qemu with g3 as a cpu profile.. right?

shmerl•1h ago

Can't cross compilation help for that? The CPU compiling doesn't need to match the target.

a99c43f2d565504•59m ago

It's not the target that is now requiring new instructions, but one of the components in the build tools.

shmerl•39m ago

I see.

jchw•1h ago

Apparently it was fixed upstream by Google?

https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/593#note_2681207153

Not sure how long it will take to get resolved but that thread seems reassuring even if there isn't a direct source that it was fixed.

nativeforks•1h ago

Still haven't. Currently, most of the devs aren't aware of this underlying issue!

roywashere•1h ago

This is sort of like a bug I hit last year when the mysql docker container suddenly started requiring x86-64-v2 after a patch level upgrade and failed to start: https://github.com/docker-library/mysql/issues/1055

userbinator•1h ago

Fortunately the source code is available:

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...

If I had the time, I'd try to compile a binary of it that will run on Win95 just to give my fuckings to the planned obsolescence crowd.

maxloh•55m ago

There is no point for Google to push planned obsolescence on the PC or server space. They don't have a market there.

userbinator•48m ago

It does benefit them to make it harder for competitors.

maxloh•33m ago

When you mention "competitors," what industries or markets are you referring to?

No one would write Android apps on a Chromebook, and making it harder to do so would only reduce the incentive for companies to develop Android apps.

How could Google benefit from pushing a newer instruction set standard on Windows and macOS?

heavyset_go•16m ago

The one moderately popular competitor is the project in the OP that is suffering directly from this upstream change.

tonyhart7•15m ago

"If I had the time, I'd try to compile a binary of it that will run on Win95 just to give my fuckings to the planned obsolescence crowd"

The idea that not supporting a 20+ year old system is "planned obsolescence" is a bit shallow

wpm•59m ago

I’ve got an old Ivy Bridge-EP Dell workstation they can borrow goddamn SSE4.1 is nearly old enough to drink.

rpcope1•20m ago

Yeah I was kind of shocked too. Core 2 could do both of those instruction sets. A used Dell Precision can be had for very little and probably would be grossly more efficient than whatever they're using.

yjftsjthsd-h•44m ago

> Google’s new aapt2 binary in AGP 8.12.0

Given F-Droid's emphasis on isolating and protecting their build environment, I'm kind of surprised that they're just using upstream binaries and not building from source.

micw•38m ago

As far as I can see, sse4.1 has been introduced in CPUs in 2011. That's more than 10 years ago. I wonder why such old servers are still in use. I'd assume that a modern CPU would do the same amount of work with a fraction of energy so that it does not even make economical sense to run such outdated hardware.

Does anyone know the numbers of build servers and the specs?

heavyset_go•19m ago

Hardware after the first couple of generations of x86_64 muliticore processors are perfectly capable machines to use as servers, even for tasks you want to put off to a build farm.

LukeShu•15m ago

I was going to say that I assume that the reason for such old CPUs is the ability to use Canoeboot/GNU Boot. But you absolutely can put an SSE4.2 CPU in a KGPE-D16 motherboard. So IDK.

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F-Droid build servers can't build modern Android apps due to outdated CPUs

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