I use foxy droid but no clue how it compares to the other third party ones and I’m just to lazy to try another as it does the job.

Many apps can act as installer aps. Installing an app is basically the process of unpacking the APK file into a directory where all the other user.apps are stored and registering it with the system. The challenge, such as it is, is making sure two different installer apps aren’t trying to manage the same app package.

So if you’ve installed an app that’s available from one of the F-Droid repos that’s also available on Play Store, both apps may try to update it. Its not a common conflict since the F-Droid versions tend to have a different signature than the Play Store versions, so the other installer tends not to try and overwrite it.

As for how the F-Droid scene works, there are different collections of packages curated by different teams. These curated collections are called repositories, or repos as I mentioned above. Each repo tends to have a unique focus for the apps they support. They build and sign the apps so the installers know the provenance of a given package.

As for the installer apps, they are simply clients that can subscribe to different repos and collate the indexes of applications available on each. When you search for an app, you’re really searching the index and in the event you get multiple hits, your client app should let you select which repo you want to pull the APK file from. That client app may then attempt to update that app as newer versions become available.

Finally, to come to the point and answer your question: You can install the new app (e.g., Droid-ify) alongside F-Droid and begin configuring it. Maybe just only have auto-updates enabled in one of them. They will both provide similar functionality for supporting multiple repos, installing and auto-updating apps, though they have different UIs with different ergonomics and workflows.

Myself, I have both F-Droid and Droid-ify installed, and I still use the Play Store. I mainly use Droid-ify because I like the cleaner UI, but I understand F-Droid finally updated their UI as well. (It was needed, IMO). Droid-ify has the auto-update job for now.

edit: Apparently I forgot that I uninstalled F-Droid some time ago. Just checked and its not there anymore. Oops, I lied.

Hope this helps;

i tried droid-ify after reading recommendations on Lemmy and i’m still on it after about a year.

it comes with repos already listed and you activate them with just a touch/click

export/import preferences and favorites list helps a lot with resets

Just install the new app, and add the repos. Uninstall or disable or whatever the old app once you see that it works without issues.

You could have multiple apps installed at the same time. It’s of no use but you could.

I recommend F-Droid Basic, it is more modern.

You just copy the repo URLs and install the other client and add the repos there.

Android apps are handled by the android package manager. That uses the signatures that were used to sign APKs. The stores just download them.

The source of the APKs is important though. F-Droid builds them on its own, this results in a more consistent build that may be more secure. But you need to trust F-Droid AND the developer.

Also, F-Droid is often multiple versions behind, where the developers might release newer versions.

F-droid uses a single key to sign all APKs, normally every dev has their own key.

If you use Obtainium, you normally get the APKs directly from releases of the devs. The same goes if you have external repositories, btw I updated this list recently and there are a lot of EOL repos.

Once an APK is installed, you can only update it, if the key matches. This means if you want to switch for example from Mull (F-Droid) to Mull (DivestOS repo) you need to reinstall the app.

But if you still use the apps from the same sources, you dont need to do that, and the client doesnt matter.