The new home of /r/Android on Lemmy and the Fediverse!
Android news, reviews, tips, and discussions about rooting, tutorials, and apps.
🔗Universal Link: !android@lemdro.id
💡Content Philosophy:
Content which benefits the community (news, rumours, and discussions) is generally allowed and is valued over content which benefits only the individual (technical questions, help buying/selling, rants, self-promotion, etc.) which will be removed if it's in violation of the rules.
Support, technical, or app related questions belong in: !askandroid@lemdro.id
For fresh communities, lemmy apps, and instance updates: !lemdroid@lemdro.id
📰Our communities below
Stay on topic: All posts should be related to the Android OS or ecosystem.
No support questions, recommendation requests, rants, or bug reports: Posts must benefit the community rather than the individual. Please post to !askandroid@lemdro.id.
Describe images/videos, no memes: Please include a text description when sharing images or videos. Post memes to !androidmemes@lemdro.id.
No self-promotion spam: Active community members can post their apps if they answer any questions in the comments. Please do not post links to your own website, YouTube, blog content, or communities.
No reposts or rehosted content: Share only the original source of an article, unless it's not available in English or requires logging in (like Twitter). Avoid reposting the same topic from other sources.
No editorializing titles: You can add the author or website's name if helpful, but keep article titles unchanged.
No piracy or unverified APKs: Do not share links or direct people to pirated content or unverified APKs, which may contain malicious code.
No unauthorized polls, bots, or giveaways: Do not create polls, use bots, or organize giveaways without first contacting mods for approval.
No offensive or low-effort content: Don't post offensive or unhelpful content. Keep it civil and friendly!
No affiliate links: Posting affiliate links is not allowed.
Our Communities
Lemmy App List
Chat and More
Awesome app. It is somehow not listed on android-foss list so maybe someone didn't know about it.
Obtainium allows you to install and update Open-Source Apps directly from their releases pages, and receive notifications when new releases are made available.
GitHub page: Link.
Malicious APKs, built by the developer themselves, not matching their public source code.
Which developer?
E: Lol @ the ninja edit.
That's hardly a meaningful advantage for f-droid and the whole man in the middle risk you're exposing yourself to there. If you don't trust the developer to do the bare minimum of providing a release that matches source then why are you even installing their app? Satyr's response about developers getting compromised has way more weight in that conversation, but still falls short IMO.
Making sure the apk matches public source and running it through VT aren't going to catch a malicious apk that has the nasty bits buried in various commits but checks out in VT and matches the public source code. Sure, it'll burn them as a developer if/when they get caught, but how often does the community truly do code reviews on one-off Android apps? Not often enough to catch that kinda thing before it spreads without getting insanely lucky.
If you think about it, any developer could have their account hacked and the attacker upload an APK that includes malware. Obtainium isn't doing any malware scan or building from source or anything. If you are planning to just install from GitHub anyway, Obtainium should be a no-brainer. But I can see where might argue that having a middleman like F-Droid to validate APK integrity has some merits.
https://f-droid.org/docs/Security_Model/
https://f-droid.org/docs/Reproducible_Builds/
https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/info#security
Fair point. I guess it boils down to if you prefer speed of update (obtainium) or the extra checks f-droid has in place and if you continue to trust that f-droid's stuff doesn't get compromised.
It's also worth mentioning f-droid's workflow far from guarantees there's nothing nefarious in a package. The bar looks to be passing virus total and then ensuring the provided apk matches source. If nobody reviews the source each time then every release could be the one that gets a nasty surprise.