fdroid VS fdroidcl

I've also been confused by the way it's supposed to work and created my own tool. It's not really self-hosted and doesn't build apps by itself, but depending on your use-case it could work (kind of unlikely though).

It's not published in the Play Store or the official F-Droid repository, but you can add my F-Droid repository to download and receive update notifications (or just download the APK file from the latest release, but you won't get updates).

I like this app for interfacing with fdroid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.machiav3lli.fdroid/

I also like this CLI for bulk downloading apks for initializing a new device over adb: https://github.com/mvdan/fdroidcl

To get releases faster there is obtanium: https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium

I've been trying to automate my smartphone configuration and backup lately.

I use a lot of apps from F-droid, and was pleased to discover fdroidcl: https://github.com/mvdan/fdroidcl

I now have a script that installs most of my daily drivers from it, given ADB and developer mode active on the phone.

F-Droid is about user freedom, so there are clients that are more like Linux package managers, for example https://github.com/mvdan/fdroidcl

I mean, if you have the APKs, this should be pretty simple. Pretty sure you can make a custom repo for FDroid and do it that way, though I have not actually done it before. Have read up on it in the past though and should be not too complicated even with non F-Droid apks. Per glavinstone's answer you could take this a step farther and script the install with fdroidcl.