Freebloks

Freebloks is the Android version of Freebloks 3D, a desktop game by Alex Besstschastnich, Frank Stolze and Sascha Hlusiak, who makes the Android app. The project describes it as “a clone of the popular board game Blokus”. Each player gets a set of pieces of different shapes, and on each turn places one so that it touches another of their own pieces at a corner, never along an edge, while blocking the others’ room to place theirs.

Ways to play

• Against the computer, which runs the original game’s engine on the phone, or against other people on the same phone.
• Online, through the developer’s server; the app is “network-compatible with Freebloks 3D for Windows and Linux”.
• On a local network, by typing the address of a phone that hosts the game, or over Bluetooth with a phone you have already paired.
• The board is shown in 3D, with a choice of board and table textures, and a game in progress is saved when you leave and restored on the next start. Since 1.8.2 it also appears in the Android TV launcher.

What goes online

Nothing until you start a multiplayer game; games against the computer run inside the app without any network connection. See the questions above for what online play sends and what hosting opens.

Two more things happen around multiplayer. Opening the Multiplayer dialog starts a Bluetooth listener, so paired phones can join, and on Android 12 and later asks for the Nearby devices permission. And each time you leave the app, it holds the phone awake for up to 10 minutes, so a multiplayer game can carry on in the background; it does this in single-player too.

The Google Play version includes Google’s Firebase Crashlytics crash reporting and Google Play Games for leaderboards and achievements. This build has neither: F-Droid’s version is built without them.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s build of Freebloks 1.8.6, compiled from the developer’s source and signed with F-Droid’s key. Version 1.8.5 replaced its OpenGL ES 1 renderer with OpenGL ES 2, raised the minimum Android version to 8.0 and added translations; 1.8.6 fixes a crash when resuming a game.
• The 5.8 MB file runs on Android 8.0 and later, on ARM and x86, 32- and 64-bit. It declares 10 permissions: internet; three Bluetooth entries, although the Bluetooth-admin one is limited to Android 5.0 and cannot apply on this Android 8+ build; vibration; keeping the phone awake; notifications; two for the background service during multiplayer; and one internal permission that Android libraries add. Our scan found no trackers.
• The app is translated into Portuguese, from a Brazilian contribution: 137 of its 154 main texts, with the remaining 17 all on the rules screen. Its piece-size and theme names are translated too.
• The screenshots are the developer’s own, from April 2025.
• The game modes and the rules screen use the name Blokus, the commercial board game Freebloks copies, and the server’s address contains it too. The app has no trademark notice; an old note in the engine’s history thanking Blokus’s original publisher for permission was removed in 2008.

Licences

The README says Freebloks is licensed under the GNU GPL “either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version”; F-Droid lists it as GPL-2.0 only. Inside the APK, beyond the code:

• Sound effects: of the eight, the one for starting to drag a piece is the freedesktop sound theme’s “message” sound by Ivica Bukvic, and the one for a player running out of moves is Ubuntu’s “dialog-error” sound by Nathaniel McCallum. Both are under Creative Commons BY-SA licences, which require credit; the app gives none. The undo sound came through the sound-search site Soungle, with no licence, and the other five have no known source.
• Textures: the 12 board and background textures have no documented origin or licence.
• Texture decoder: the app’s KTX texture library includes Ericsson’s ETC decoder, licensed only for use with OpenGL, OpenGL ES and WebGL, which is how the app uses it. The library’s licence also asks for the sentence “this software is based in part on the work of the Khronos Group”, which the app doesn’t show.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one.