An audit of one week's F-Droid updates finds 74 of 102 apps largely written by an LLM

A blog post published on 15 September 2026 by a FOSS maintainer who writes as tintotint audits every app in F-Droid's 12 September update batch and rates 74 of the 102 as largely written by a large language model. Nineteen show little to no sign of AI involvement, and nine sit in a category the author calls hard to say. The post reached 131 points on Hacker News.

What was counted

The batch was every app F-Droid pushed as an update on 12 September 2026: a real production week, not a sample. tintotint says up front that the method is superficial. An app is placed in one of three tiers by reading the repository: recent commits and their content, the README, whether the repo carries agent infrastructure such as a Claude Code configuration, and whether accepted pull requests come from agents. Any project with agent infrastructure lands in "mostly AI"; the other bar for that tier is that more than half of the code looks LLM-authored on a repository walk.

The counts: 74 apps (72.5 percent) mostly AI, 19 apps (18.6 percent) with no signs of AI, and 9 apps (8.8 percent) hard to say. The author flags each app with a one-line justification, so a reader who disagrees with a specific call can check the repository against the same evidence.

The specific tells

tintotint's list of what pushed an app into the mostly-AI tier is worth reading, because it is what any reviewer or downstream user can look for. Explicit Claude co-authorship on commits appears in Amber, Braincup, DeltaSync and MainTask, and MainTask lists Claude Sonnet 5 by name. Agent scaffolding sitting in the repository, such as a Claude Code folder, was enough on its own for a mostly-AI rating. Planning .md files pushed to a repo, README emoji patterns the author calls "LLM emoji vomit", and AI-generated app icons all count.

Two edge cases stand out. One developer, brandonp2412, ships several apps in this cycle, all vibe-coded, under widely different namespaces including com.presley.* and com.codesail.*. The author suggests either an active vibe-coder or an agent given a GitHub account. Two others, DuressKeyboard and UnlicenseLauncher, have been developed for months entirely through GitHub's web file editor rather than a git client. Four of the five apps hosted on Codeberg, which forbids AI-generated code, are rated mostly AI.

What this measures

tintotint spells out the limits. The three-tier judgement is one person's read of one week's batch, no code quality analysis, no maintainability check. The author's stance on LLMs is stated up front and is unfavourable, which matters when reading a call that came down to a gut read of a commit history. The 72.5 percent figure is a proxy for how much code visibly involves an LLM, not for how much is broken.

The number is still the first anybody has published on F-Droid this specific, and it changes what a privacy-focused Android user does when they open F-Droid to look for an alternative to a proprietary app. The default assumption is now that most of what shipped this week was written by an agent, that the human whose account made the release may not have read every diff, and that Codeberg hosting is not a reliable signal on its own. The five-minute check the audit uses is the same one anyone can run: open the repo, read the last twenty commits, and search for a CLAUDE.md or .agents folder.

Source

How much of F-Droid is LLM generated?, tintotint, 15 September 2026. Hacker News discussion, 131 points.