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.
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.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
It’s probably not an official thing. F-Droid can’t distribute apps in the official repo via their own policy if the developer doesn’t agree. Third-party repos like Guardian can.
Can confirm, the repository was Guardian Project
I know, it even says so in the post:
Haha it would help if I could read 🤣
If it’s not official, how do you verify who is building the binary?
I think they ship prebuilt binaries, i.e. the exact same ones you find on the Signal website
AFAIK this also applies to Tor Browser, Orbot and other third-party apps distributed by Guardian
Edit: I downloaded the files and manually verified the signatures. They are indeed the exact same files.
Because I didn’t really know how to grab an APK from the Guardian F-Droid repo, I used their S3 bucket and downloaded the Signal APK. It’s named
Signal-Android-website-prod-universal-release-7.30.2.apk
, which is the exact same file name as the one of the APK you can get from the Signal website.I then used
keytool
to print the signature certificate fingerprint: (renamed the files to make it less confusing)The fingerprints are identical.
Another edit: I just noticed that Signal even has official instructions for checking the signature on their APK download page. They use
apksigner
instead ofkeytool
, but it’s basically the same process.Thanks for doing this!
Takes like 2 minutes 😅