this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2025
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I just noticed today that Signal (not talking Molly) is now available on F-Droid via the "Guardian" repository.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up.

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[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (9 children)

I have a tangential question. Would it not make sense for an OS, in this case Android, to have some proper mechanism for installing apps (in this case APKs) directly from a website (as lots of people have been doing fastidiously from signal.org by necessity)?

After all, this is all about trust. With software, assuming that you trust the developer, the goal is to be sure that nobody interfered with the developer's compiled software - and who better to guarantee that than the developer themself, at their own domain? DNS resolution is already based on the "web of trust" principle, which is why you can trust your bank's website. Arguably F-Droid performs a valuable role as a curator and selector of good software, but is there any good technical need for it to actually distribute the software?

[–] said@lemmy.sdf.org 15 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Not exactly answering your question but you can use the app Obtainium to fetch the apk URL from a website/github repo and many other sources to install directly. It also supports fdroid repos and many other sources out of the box. Kinda half way what you mentioned in your first paragraph.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Yes true! Forgot about Obtainium. ~~Personally I'm not much tempted because all it does is swap out F-Droid for Github (i.e. Microsoft) as the middleman.~~ But I agree that it's definitely a win for convenience.

PS: Turns out Obtainium is source-agnostic. Good news.

[–] said@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Of course Github is just an example but you can pretty much regex any URL and further filter out anything in order to get the apk link with it. So depending on your level of privacy requirement and trusted sources, you can skip all the centralized ones and build your own list of sources.

[–] JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

So it does! OK so this is pretty close to a decent solution after all (the ideal one being IMO exactly the same thing but native to the OS). Thanks for the correction.

[–] logging_strict@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Thank you for posting the link

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