It wants me to uninstall and reinstall since the signature of different, which makes sense as it from a different source, but it doesn’t mention anything in the changelog.
It wants me to uninstall and reinstall since the signature of different, which makes sense as it from a different source, but it doesn’t mention anything in the changelog.
because fdroid build all of their apps themselves, so every app on the fdroid repo uses the fdroid signing key
Interesting, I was not aware of that. sounds like a security risk, as you don’t know who actually published it, but I guess since its open source that doesn’t really matter as much
You know who published it. It’s the fdroid devs. Fdroid follows very much the old Linux repository philophosy where the owner of the repo acts as a middleman, providing the central layer of trust. You don’t have to trust the developers because the distributor has done their due diligence and checked it. That’s why fdroid takes a couple of days to push updates. They are doing some basic quality control first.
This model made a lot of sense in the world of traditional Linux packaging, where every obscure distribution has their own package format and developers couldn’t possibly be expected to support all of these. It makes less sense on Android (or in a word where flatpak exists for that matter).
Is this going to remain the case for F-Droid reproducible builds?
Quite the opposite. From the user perspective, it’s much easier to trust the repository than trusting every single developer not losing their password. In case of OSS it also ensures reproducible builds.
It’s actually the opposite, an evil developer could upload in GitHub an apk with malware not included in the source, while fdroid guarantees that it matches with the source published
I’d recommend giving this article a read, just to inform you about f-droid client https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
An alternative client being Neo Store