this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
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Privacy
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Why is using the GitHub release more secure than using the F-Droid build?
Edited: https://f-droid.org/2023/01/15/towards-a-reproducible-fdroid.html
Thanks, I know about reproducible builds, but I still don't see how the GitHub release is more secure than the F-Droid build. In both cases you need to trust whoever built the apk.
It is known that F-Droid uses the published source code, reviews it for anti-features, and they build hundreds of apps used by thousands of people. If they did any tampering or had a security hole we would learn about it pretty fast (we just need one user of one of their built apps to report).
On the other hand using a GitHub release we need to trust the developer of the app: trust that the source code has no malicious code in it (or review the code ourselves, does anybody do that?), there's no third party reviewing it, and trust that the apk they release uses exactly the published code. The user base of an individual app's GitHub release is way smaller than that of all apps built by F-Droid, so by chance it would take way longer for users to detect any security problem.
So, as I see it, it boils down to either trusting a big community with a long story of building and providing FOSS apps, a good reputation, and offering reproducible builds on all apps that managed to achieve them; or trusting dozens of different developers, most of whom we know nothing of.
I appreciate this comment. I agree with both sides of the argument to an extent, but feel that there is some unbalanced thinking with this rejection of Fdroid that's been happening. Its a hugely important service.
Yes, I feel like F-Droid has been getting some shit lately for no reason. I think it's good that Obtainium exists and that we have more options of easily getting apps outside the Play Store, and even better: FOSS apps.
However, I see a trend towards "F-Droid is bad and Obtainium has arrived to save us from it" and get the feeling that many times people don't even understand how both things work. Obtainium is basically doing what some people were doing for long time using RSS, it's not a revolution. When I tried it, it failed to properly detect the latest versions and updates of several apps, so I was personally not impressed.
To add to this, “Kvaesitso is available in the official F-Droid repository, but all features depending on non-foss external APIs were removed.” This is preferable to a lot of people.
Fdroid is not a virus scanner you can trust blindly. You have to trust both, app devs and fdroid. I fully agree with what you write. Most devs do not yet publish reproducible builds. Maybe Fdroid should've created a separate repo just for them and depreciating the old repo over time. There's no way for the user to know if it is a reproducible build or not right now. I prefer fdroid with reproducible builds over obtainium but in it's current state it's ambiguous which method you should use. I lean towards obtainium. In hindsight I should'nt have stated it that confident
Your link is a bit broken