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F-Droid 2.0

1465 points · 420 comments · daveoc64

  1. jjice · · focus · HN ↗
    What does the future of something like F-Droid look like once Google does their lock down next year?
    1. pritambaral · · focus · HN ↗
      Since F-Droid (i.e., the repositories, not the app) builds all apps, a practical solution would be for the repositories (i.e., their signing keys) to be recognized by El Goog. Whether and how much help / obstacle the "maybe we do evil" company puts up for / against this is a different question.
      1. trinsic2 · · focus · HN ↗
        It seems to me this is a blocker to use if google can restrict sideloading like this. Its not going to end with just get people requiring to register their app with an identity. Wont they be able to put presser on f-droid devs to lock out software they consider a threat to some business model?
        1. McDyver · · focus · HN ↗
          > sideloading

          That newspeak term should just disappeared. It only contributes to the image that downloading and installing an app is something that is outside the "happy path". Installing software of your choice on a device you own shouldn't be demonised

          1. ragequittah · · focus · HN ↗
            Surely you see how installing unvetted software on a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc. probably shouldn't be part of the "happy path" for most people. You shouldn't even install software you haven't fully vetted from the google play store. This should be drilled into non-technical people.

            Those of us who want to can easily bypass it. My mom who doesn't know what she's doing and gets a phishing email with a fancy apk attached should probably have a hard time using it.

            1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
              > a device that holds your entire life, bank info, photos, etc

              That device was called personal computer for decades, and the world didn't end for the simplicity of installing software on it.

              1. charcircuit · · focus · HN ↗
                The world may not of ended but to of people have been hurt by malware ruining their computer, cryptolocking all of their company's files for ransom, stealing all of your login credentials, stealing cryptocurrency, taking secret photos with your webcam, screen recording what you are doing on your computer, etc.

                The "personal computer" has a terrible track record.

                1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                  That seems to happen on phones too
                  1. charcircuit · · focus · HN ↗
                    It is much rarer since it needs 0 day to do these at the same level as possible on a pc. The play store scanning apps for malware is an important safety mechanism against this. Further more imposter apps like YouTube but with no ads that are Trojans that steal people's accounts.
                    1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                      Or the accessibility permission, or to some degree the access all files ones; but it's also enough for the app to pilfer the data you trust it with.

                      The Play Store's scanning is very far from perfect, and the amount of crap that's on it, combined with the trust that people have towards it, and apps' unfettered access to internet, makes malicious software easily more common than on PCs.

                      Even without considering as malicious the enormous data collection that almost everything on the Play Store does, encouraged by Google

                2. krzyk · · focus · HN ↗
                  Just like people get robbed, it is as common as that.

                  It doesn't mean one can't buy nice things because one is afraid of being robbed.

                  1. charcircuit · · focus · HN ↗
                    Except a sane society puts rules in place against robbers and then bans such people from society.
                    1. Vrondi · · focus · HN ↗
                      There have already been laws against scammers and hackers for a long time.
                    2. krzyk · · focus · HN ↗
                      There are such laws already, what ragequittah was proposing (and Google implementing) is handcuffing people that are not robbers.
                      1. ragequittah · · focus · HN ↗
                        More like an alarm that deters (though not always) the robbers. You can still very easily sideload apps.
                3. Vrondi · · focus · HN ↗
                  For many decades, people have been mistakenly putting diesel fuel into their gasoline cars, yet we never outlawed diesel vehicles. You can only do so much to protect people without destroying their rights to their property.
                  1. charcircuit · · focus · HN ↗
                    Society moved to having it so diesel fuel pump would not fit into gasoline cars.

                    Society didn't ban doing it, but put up barriers that help the average person from doing something dangerous.

                    1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                      The slight difference is that no one in their right mind would ever want to put diesel in a gasoline car

                      I think the pumps still fit where I live, btw

                      1. bryankaplan · · focus · HN ↗
                        Rent or borrow a vehicle, and mistakenly fill it up according to habit. It's an easy mistake to make.

                        Making the nozzle shapes incompatible is a smart solution, but in the US at least I'm pretty sure they're interchangeable.

                  2. dogmatism · · focus · HN ↗
                    the pump handles are green tho
                    1. m4rtink · · focus · HN ↗
                      Many people are partially color blind, with IIRC most people having issues with properly seeing the green color.
              2. JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
                > That device was called personal computer

                To be fair, mobile phones being locked down probably contributed to the mass adoption of e.g. mobile payments and banking.

                1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                  Web banking was offered by all banks long before banking apps, and you could of course access it from smartphones

                  The move to apps made things more difficult, if anything

                  1. JumpCrisscross · · focus · HN ↗
                    Offered but less broadly adopted. Having a platform that doesn't tend to get infected when used by normal users helped with that.
                    1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                      It was adopted by everyone I knew

                      And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............

                      It's now that a lot of people can't use any remote banking, because their bank's app is huge or refuses to run on their phone.

                      1. tpxl · · focus · HN ↗
                        > And they used an actually secure OTP dongle, eventually ditched by most banks because, yeah SMS codes and apps are safer............

                        The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use. This makes me sad, but it does have merit.

                        FWIW I still use the website to do all my payments. I find banking apps to be madness - you're entrusting all your money to what is essentially a toy.

                        1. landgenoot · · focus · HN ↗
                          > The EU mandates the 2FA method shows information about the purchase you're authenticating (timestamp, amount and cc used in my case), making unconnected dongles impossible to use.

                          There are unconnected photoTAN devices that support this. They have a camera that reads a QR code. Some European banks use this. E.g. Vasco digipass 770

                      2. m4rtink · · focus · HN ↗
                        Yeah, compared to separate hardware HSMs mobile banking is a massive downgrade in both security as well as user being in control of the hardware they own (by forcing locked down closer source OS & forcing hardware updates).

                        If mobile banking really wanted to be secure, they would support something like a NFC yubikey for transaction verification. The fact they fully ignore separate secure HSMs tells you what you need to know about their security.

              3. bluebarbet · · focus · HN ↗
                The difference is that the only people who used those personal computers were (are) an educated subset of the middle class in developed countries.
                1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                  No. Plenty of people with no technical knowledge.

                  Today people get in debt to have the latest orange iPhone, for a long time before that most people in, ok, developed countries somehow got hold of a computer.

                  Maybe with less brain cells burned by

                  1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                    I somehow forgot that last sentence there, apologies
                2. encom · · focus · HN ↗
                  That hasn't been true since September 1993.
                  1. bluebarbet · · focus · HN ↗
                    It was true then and it is true now. Outside businesspeople and students and the middle class of OECD countries (all amounting to a low single-digit percentage of the world population), ordinary people never bought desktop or laptop computers. By contrast, everyone has a mobile one in their pocket today.
                    1. g-b-r · · focus · HN ↗
                      That's just false
                      1. bluebarbet · · focus · HN ↗
                        More likely you're living in a bubble unrepresentative of the rest of the world. I just did some research, inconclusive because nobody is tracking this data. Personal-computer ownership in rich countries (i.e. "OECD") is indeed high. But only 12% of the world's population lives in Europe and North America combined. The figure is much much lower elsewhere in the world, where everyone lives. For example, 16 computers per 100 people in Brazil in the 2010s. [1] Most people in the world have never touched a laptop or desktop. Now that computing has gone mobile-first, the figure is only going to keep dropping.

                        [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldpopulationreview.com&#x2F;country-rankings&#x2F;computers-per-capita-by-country" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worldpopulationreview.com&#x2F;country-rankings&#x2F;computers...

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