Privacy

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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.

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VLC - App stores were a mistake (archive.is)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

193 comments fedilink hide all child comments

VideoLAN @videolan App Stores were a mistake. Currently, we cannot update VLC on Windows Store, and we cannot update VLC on Android Play Store, without reducing security or dropping a lot of users... For now, iOS App Store still allows us to ship for iOS9, but until when?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Why do Google need the private key? I can only see it being used to modify apps without notice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Iirc, they build the app and publish it for you. "For convenience and security"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Wow, that is terrible.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yyes.

With Play App Signing, Google manages and protects your app's signing key for you and uses it to sign optimized, distribution APKs that are generated from your app bundles. Play App Signing stores your app signing key on Google’s secure infrastructure and offers upgrade options to increase security.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/9842756?hl=en

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, but only because it's Google. Fdroid do exactly the same thing in their repo.

The idea behind it is sound, because otherwise you're putting all your trust in the app developer. By having the store do some basic checks and compile the app the idea is they can guarantee no third party/bad actor has inserted malicious code.

However, this being Google, they are the bad actor.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

No, that is wrong, the app developer signs the app with their private key, sends it to Google, google scans ans verifies the app, and add their signature with their own private key.

The app can thus be verified to have been built by a specific developer and verified by Google before publishing, without breaking trust