F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository
f-droid.orgF-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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Sure, I’ll spell it out for you since apparently the point went right over your head. Fdroid devs are a single point of failure by signing every application themselves. This introduces a potential for supply chain attack, not to mention Fdroid running on EOL servers.
When you use an individual dev repo, you can avoid any trojanized apps from Fdroid because the developers maintain their own infrastructure and sign their own apks.
That’s called… D I S T R I B U T E D T R U S T
Everything the F-droid team does is out in the open. Your welcome to audit it once in a while and suggest changes to make it better. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind the help.
F-droid is the best tool we got. Its not a silver bullet but it is better than anything else I’ve seen
The reason F-Droid builds from source is to ensure that they can enforce their inclusion criteria. If you go outside F-Droid you lose that guarantee. For example, self-published apks in github or google play may contain anti-features or proprietary code that are forbidden by the F-Droid standards.
From another point of view, what you call a single point of failure is a third party that represents the interests of the user community, independent from individual developers. This is the same model used in GNU/Linux distributions, and Drew DeVault explains here the role that software distributions play in the free software community.
Of course, this represents a trade-off, in that you are placing trust in the software distribution instead of or in addition to the upstream developer. The question is, how can you solve the problem without foregoing F-Droid’s inclusion standards? The answer is reproducible builds, where F-Droid builds from source and compares to the developer’s apk, and publishes the developer’s apk with their signature if the build reproduces successfully.
Until Reproducible builds are the norm in the Android free software world, I accept the trade-off because I value having software freedom in my computing, and I know I can’t trust upstream developers to care about that as much as F-Droid or I do.
Sure, atleast you admit there’s a trade off (security) for (FOSS) and maybe some additional privacy.
People should be made aware of the risks and choose according to their threat models, which is why I’ve highlighted some of these issues to begin with.