My Android apps update before the Play Store gets them — this one tool made that possible

I install many open-source Android apps on my phone. While these apps are great, they all share a common issue: updates are a manual affair. That means you have to keep checking their official GitHub repo for a newer version, then install the update by hand. A common workaround is to use an app distribution platform like F-Droid, but it comes with its own quirks. F-Droid rebuilds each app from source, so the build you get isn't signed with the developer's original signature. Updates also tend to arrive slower than the official release, and not every app is on F-Droid in the first place.

Obtainium fixes these gaps rather nicely. It's a free, open-source app updater that pulls releases straight from the source, whether that's GitHub, a developer's own website, or even an F-Droid page. Once you add an app, Obtainium watches its release page and tells you the moment a new version lands, often before the Play Store catches up. So instead of bookmarking a dozen GitHub pages, I let Obtainium do the watching for me.

Why Obtainium beats F-Droid

An app updater, not an app store

First things first, Obtainium isn't a drop-in replacement for F-Droid. F-Droid is more of an app store for open-source apps that may or may not be on the Google Play Store. It hosts the apps, builds them, and serves them to you. Obtainium, on the other hand, is simply an app updater. It doesn't host anything itself.

Instead, Obtainium points to wherever the developer publishes their releases and pulls the APK directly from there. And I have a very good reason why that matters. When F-Droid builds an app, it re-signs it with its own key, so Android ends up pinning F-Droid's certificate instead of the developer's. With Obtainium, you install the developer's own signed build, and every future update has to match that same signature.

You'd think hosting and updating are the same job, but they're not. That's exactly why the two tools can sit side by side rather than compete, and why I still keep F-Droid around as a backup app source even with Obtainium installed.

Installing Obtainium and adding your first app

Download the APK, then point it at a release page

Obtainium isn't on the Play Store, so you grab it the same way it grabs everything else: from its GitHub releases page. Open the latest release, scroll to Assets, and download the top APK file. Install it like any other sideloaded app, and Obtainium lands on your home screen. If you've never installed an app from outside the Play Store, our walkthrough on how to manually sideload apps on Android covers the permission toggle you'll need to flip.

When you first open Obtainium, you'll see four tabs along the bottom. Before adding anything, I head to Settings, set a background update-check interval, and turn on background updates so it checks on its own.

Adding an app happens in the Add App tab. You can paste a release-page URL directly, or search by name for sources that support it. Keep the correct source checked, tap Add, and the app shows up under the Apps tab, ready to track.

Installing apps from trusted sources

Install from upstream first, then let Obtainium track it

The safest way to use Obtainium is to install the first copy of an app yourself, from a source you trust, and only then hand tracking over to it. When you install that first APK, Android pins the signing certificate. From that point on, any update Obtainium fetches has to be signed with the same key, or the install simply fails. Even a misbehaving Obtainium couldn't slip you a tampered build using a different signature.

For apps hosted on a developer's own website, like Signal or Mullvad, you can paste the main site URL, and Obtainium knows where to look for the actual APK download.

If you are sure where an app's source lives, you can open its F-Droid page and use the Source code link to jump to its GitHub or Codeberg repo, where the real releases usually sit. And when an APK exists only on F-Droid, you can still add it. Obtainium just labels it by F-Droid, so it's obvious you're trusting F-Droid's signer rather than the original developer's.

Obtainium has its limitations

It is not magic, and a few things still break

While Obtainium automates updates for your non-Play Store apps, it still has its limitations. The first thing to know is that updates aren't fully hands-off. Obtainium can download and install updates in the background, but only on a best-effort basis, and on a standard, non-rooted phone, it usually still asks you to confirm each install. If a background update quietly fails, you won't always get an error about it.

There's also an install-status quirk. Because installs happen asynchronously, Obtainium can't always tell whether one actually went through, so its list can show the wrong version until you reopen the app and let it re-check.

Then there's scraping fragility. For sources without a clean release feed, Obtainium reads the page's HTML directly to find the APK. A small redesign on the developer's end can break update detection until a fix is pushed out.

None of this is a dealbreaker. But you would have to do a periodic sanity check to make sure that your most important apps are actually installed and current.

A quieter way to stay current

On my phone, Obtainium quietly handles the apps I'd otherwise forget to update manually. Tubular, the NewPipe fork that brings SponsorBlock to a clean YouTube front-end, sits there alongside Aurora Store and Breezy Weather. These are the ones that used to send me hunting through GitHub releases every few weeks, and now they just appear in the Apps tab the moment something is new.

Sure, it won't replace F-Droid entirely, and it won't silently update everything while you sleep. But if your goal is to run the developer's own builds and get them as early as possible, Obtainium gets you closer to the source than anything else I've tried.