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Both things might be true. Sideloaded apps are probably way more likely to be malicious, but also most installed malware/crapware is quite likely coming from Go
by CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
Both things might be true. Sideloaded apps are probably way more likely to be malicious, but also most installed malware/crapware is quite likely coming from Google Play.
- xigoi 7mo agoI’ve never found a malicious app on F-Droid.
- SkiFire13 7mo agoTo be honest the limited popularity of F-Droid also helps it be less targetted by bad actors. If it was more popular I would bet the situation would surely be different
- fsflover 7mo agoThis argument can be refuted by considering Debian repositories. No malware exists there despite it being a good target. It's the FLOSS that solves the malware problem, with a bit of moderation.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoI'd argue OSS isn't sufficient on its own and that I suspect moderation only plays a small role. I think it's primarily the separation of roles. For a complete outsider whose only interest is exploiting users publishing a sufficiently popular piece of software and also gaining the ability to add things to the debian repos is a huge barrier. You'd have to invest years of work to do both of those things and then hope that no one happened to notice anything before it was too late. Of course the FLOSS aspect adds an additional hurdle that this popular piece of software will have to somehow avoid having much of a contributor community around it since that would greatly increase the risks of your malicious changeset being reviewed. I guess what happened with XZ was about the best case scenario that an attacker could realistically hope for.
- duckmysick 7mo agoThere were a few mishaps with PyPI and npm - including in the past week and even today. Not sure if those meet your criteria of FLOSS, but if it does I wouldn't call it solved.
- fc417fc802 7mo agoYeah but supply chain attacks like that can hit literally anything. Debian repos, Play store, an individual publishing on his own website, it's all vulnerable.
- izacus 7mo agoAre you really unable to comprehend just how small of a userbase F-droid represents for Android ecosystem?
- xigoi 7mo agoIf it’s that small, how does killing it help anything?
- IshKebab 7mo agoNobody said it did. Google is not doing this to kill F-Droid.
- xigoi 7mo agoWhy do you think they are doing it?
- lern_too_spel 7mo agoF-Droid still works the same as it did before. This just means that McDonald's can distribute its apps on its website without showing a scary warning on install on Google's Android builds.
- xigoi 7mo agoNo it doesn’t. You will now have to follow a lengthy process before being allowed to install apps from F-Droid.
- lern_too_spel 7mo ago[dead]
- jeroenhd 7mo agoTo stop scammer-guided malware installation, and probably those "download whatsappupdate.apk for free new emoji" ads that pop up all the time. Google doesn't care about F-Droid one way or the other. It's a niche project that barely registers on the scale of all Android users.
- UncleMeat 7mo agoF-Droid is a teeny store and requires extra steps like open sourcing such that it is not an appealing vector for malware authors. Either you want to target the Play store so that you can get a wider install base but need to deal with tighter controls or you want to distribute flagrantly malicious stuff to people for banking trojans or whatever via social engineering to get them to sideload. F-Droid doesn't help with either of these things.