How to add and update sideloaded Android apps with Obtainium

You can find many of these apps on alternative app stores or code repositories like GitHub. Some of the apps are also available on the developer’s own websites. While downloading and installing such apps on your Android phone isn’t hard, keeping them updated is a chore. If you’re like me and have many non-Play Store apps installed on your Android phone, you’d know what I’m talking about.

This is where Obtainium comes in. Obtainium is a free and open-source sideload manager that simplifies updating non-Play Store apps on Android. I’ve been using the Obtainium app on my Android phones for a while, and it has made my life so much easier.

Depending on where you sideloaded an app on your Android phone from, you have a few ways to update it. If the app is from an alternative app store like F-Droid, you can update it in the same way you’d update an app downloaded from the Play Store. However, if you downloaded it from code repositories such as GitHub and GitLab, mirror sites such as IzzyOnDroid, or the developer’s website, the workflow is quite tedious.

First, you need to check for a new version of the app, which typically involves visiting the source (usually a web page), navigating multiple menus, and looking for an updated APK file. Then, if a new one’s available, you need to download the APK and install it. What’s annoying about this approach, though, is that you need to do it for every single non-Play Store app installed on your phone. Not to mention, you need to regularly check your sideloaded apps for new updates, which is a task in itself.

Obtainium takes most of the steps out of this process. All it requires is a one-time setup that involves adding sources for the sideloaded apps on your phone to the tracking list. Once done, Obtainium runs in the background and monitors these sources to check for new versions. When a new app update is available, Obtainium sends you a notification, so you can jump in and install it. Some of the Android apps support auto-updating, too. Obtainium automatically installs the latest updates for such apps in the background without requiring any intervention.

As of writing this, Obtainium supports the following sources:

• GitHub
• GitLab
• Forgejo (Codeberg)
• F-Droid
• Third Party F-Droid
• IzzyOnDroid
• SourceHut
• APKPure
• Aptoide
• Uptodown
• Huawei AppGallery
• Tencent App Store
• Jenkins Jobs
• APKMirror
• RuStore
• Telegram App
• Neutron Code
• Direct APK Link
• Any URL that returns an HTML page with links to APK files

Obtainium is easy to set up and use. First, head to the Obtainium website, scroll down, and hit the Download Universal APK button to download the latest APK file. Then, tap the file and, when prompted, allow the app (through which you downloaded the file) to install apps. Tap Install.

Once Obtainium is installed, the next step is to add the apps you want to track for new updates. To do this:

1. Open your preferred browser app and visit the webpage from where you downloaded the app.
2. Tap the page URL you see in the address bar and copy it.
3. Open Obtainium and go to the Add app tab at the bottom.
4. Paste the copied URL into the App source URL text field and tap the Add button.

While adding an app to Obtainium, it’s important to get the source right. For example, if you installed an app via F-Droid, you must use its F-Droid link to update it too. If you try updating it via its GitHub, Obtainium won’t work. This is because even though both versions of the app have the same name and package ID, they have different digital signatures. As a result, Android identifies the mismatch and prevents Obtainium from updating the app.

When you paste a webpage URL, it presents you with a bunch of options on the screen. For instance, if the source is GitHub, you’d see the Verify the latest tag option, which tells Obtainium to strictly look for the update with the “latest” tag. This helps ensure you always get the latest public update, and all other releases, such as beta, alpha, or nightly, are ignored. Similarly, there’s the Include prereleases option, which you can toggle on if you’re testing an app’s pre-release version.

Other options include Track-only, which checks for a new update without downloading or installing it, and RegEx filtering, which lets you filter release titles and notes to find specific update releases. The best part is that these options are source-specific, so you can configure them differently for each app, which is especially useful since not all apps use similar release naming schemes.

If you’re feeling lazy or overwhelmed with so many configuration options, Obtainium’s crowdsourced app configurations can help. Put simply, these are app configurations contributed by the Obtainium community to help you quickly add hard-to-configure apps on Obtainium. Go to the Complex Obtainium Apps webpage, find the app you want to add to the list, and tap the Add to Obtainium to directly add it to Obtainium. You may sometimes need to tap the Install button to install the app and add it to Obtainium.

Once you’ve added an app, you’ll be taken to the Apps tab, and you’ll see the app you just added here. Repeat the above steps to add all your other non-Play Store apps to Obtainium.

After you add your apps, Obtainium will check for available updates every six hours. (You can configure this interval as per your needs.) If an update is available, it will automatically download and install it on your phone, unless you’ve enabled the Track-only option for its source.

That said, auto-update doesn’t work for some apps. In such a case, Obtainium only checks for a new version and sends a notification when available. You can tap the notification, which takes you to the Apps tab, and hit the download icon next to the app with a new update to update it manually.

After you’ve added the apps, you should also consider configuring some of the Obtainium settings to your preference. You’ll find these settings on the Settings tab in the app. On my phone, I’ve configured the background update check interval and enabled the Check for updates on startup, Allow parallel downloads, and Pin updates to top of apps view options.

While Obtainium greatly simplifies updating sideloaded apps on Android phones, it has a few limitations that may bother you at times. For example, it falls back to HTML scraping on websites that don’t offer an API to check for a newer version of the app. This means if a website’s code changes, Obtainium stops working. I haven’t run into this issue in my use, though.

Then, if you have too many GitHub apps installed on your phone, you may frequently hit unauthenticated API rate limits when you try updating them through Obtainium. Thankfully, you can avoid this by providing your GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT). You can check out GitHub Docs to learn more about PAT, including how to set it up.

Lastly, Obtainium has a read-only limitation on certain sites, such as APKMirror. This means Obtainium can track them to look for new updates, but it can’t download and install them. It will send you a notification when an update is available, though, so you can update the app manually.