I've always wished that mobile app "stores" worked more like Linux package managers.
Still hopeful to get a proper Linux phone someday.
No user accounts, by design
41–50 of 147 posts
Re: No user accounts, by design
#42F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
In order to reduce disruption from updates, I've found it necessary to turn them off. I'll go into the play store and update the ones I want to update, when I want to.
So for at least some users, this isn't a problem at all. It's a better default.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm familiar with the theory. But accounts just aren't a big barrier to determined bad actors. Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. And note also that some of big tech companies, despite having all the money in the world, still have problems with fake accounts. So at best, requiring user accounts is one possible anti-abuse step, but it's neither necessary nor s…
Accounts alone won't do it. Accounts and invites might? But then someone who doesn't know anyone on the site needs to figure out how to contact someone who's a member. It's not good for growth, but some websites are fine with that.
Over time the quality of the invites go down as well.
If I'm in the picky group, and we send out 5 invites total, but the unpicky group sends out 10, then 2/3 of the invites are unpicky - if the groups are the same size, which they probably won't be for a while (I'm probably inviting people who are almost as picky as I am)
There's also someone on the team who thinks we'd grow faster if we simplified the onboarding process, which is true but also means when we piss off some user they can create a bunch of accounts while they're still spun up and cause a bunch of overhead for the support team and the developers. That gets expensive too.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#44F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
>So it's manual clicking for each update.
You need to install the F-Droid Privileged Extension, or use a ROM that has it pre-installed. That way it can update apps without user interaction.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#45F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
I just use SkyDroid. It's way faster, less buggy, and compatible with Shinzuku which allows rootless auto-updates by making use of newer developer options (Android 11+)
Re: No user accounts, by design
#46The thing that F-droid are getting right here is "if we don't track you, you have privacy from us". But privacy is not secrecy. If f-droid tracked my every waking move, and then just never bother to look at that data, I would still have privacy from them. What they are doing here is a form of guaranteeing their future good behaviour. Which is nice, but there are other methods. For example I am happy to announce my pl…
> I would still have privacy from them.
No, they have an unexploited asset and you think you're safe because nobody has exploited it yet. This is false security. If money gets tight they'll exploit it. If they get bought out the new owners will exploit it. If they get hacked, the entire Internet will exploit it.
I would highly recommend that you spend a little bit of time thinking about or working with groups of dissidents, other oppressed groups, even people who have been sexually harassed. I have seen so much wrong-thinking about what Security actually is and it's always people living in a privilege bubble, not thinking of actual, real life existential threat that exposure can represent until they have some user in hiding because they got death threats after being doxxed. Or just plain disappearing because their government black-bagged them over something they posted online.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. Not really. You can't edit Wikipedia from a VPN (even with a user account!), and I think they ban most datacenters. The edits aren't really anonymous if they publicly associate with a piece of PII that, for most people, directly maps to their name and home address.
Oh? My current IP is 2601:646:4300:758:f676:3f1b:8b5:42a. Please show me how to turn that into my name and home address. Thanks!
GP's "directly" is a pretty large overstatement, but at the same time I've noticed something of an uptick over the past couple of years of people saying that IP addresses aren't PII or that people shouldn't be concerned with them getting leaked, and I just don't think that stands up to much scrutiny.
If IP addresses didn't matter for privacy, Tor routing wouldn't exist. If IP addresses weren't useful for blocking specific users, IP bans wouldn't exist. If IP addresses weren't useful for tracking, operators wouldn't have gotten up in arms about Apple's private relay service. Obviously this stuff matters.
Remember that not everyone lives in or around San Francisco. For someone in a suburban/rural area, an IP address combined with things like timestamps, user ids, and the text of the edits can go a really long way towards unmasking them. Even for people who live in more urban areas, it is still obviously easier to find someone who lives in San Francisco than it is to find someone who could be living anywhere on the West Coast. If they could also have been using a VPN, or time-shifting their posts... that makes it even harder.
In contrast, how hard do you really think it would actually be to get some address data from a voter roll or via a warrant or even just through one of the scummy person lookup services online and to iterate through everyone who shares that IP address and check to see how many of them are named Pietri? Or who have shared the username wpietri across another account, or posted somewhere else at roughly the same time? Your IP address is drastically reducing the search-space for other attacks, many of which (timing, text-analysis, etc) are impossible to get rid of when making a Wikipedia edit.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#48What we used to call "Need to know" is making a comeback. You don't need to know. I don't need to know. And in most cases the less we do know the better. Glad that GDPR is spreading this fundamental security principle again. Most websites could and should dispense with sign-in. Even those that have something to sell can compartmentalise that function these days. That's why I like Gemini, because of its regression to…
I have been experimenting with trying to draw a line between wants and consequences where I work. It's tough, and I'm only barely making headway, but on a large project what you often end up with is people adding costs to the system without a clear payoff, and without cost accounting.
I am trying to get telemetry in place to demonstrate how much of our capacity is going to particular features, so that we can say, okay, that wizbang thing is costing us $100k a year. Our profit is 1:X (we make $X for every dollar we spend). Is this lowering or raising our profit margin?
I think we are completely disconnected from opportunity costs and the entire center of most orgs I've been in are all about covering your own butt and telling stories. Until the layoffs happen and then we discover that the investors, advisors and some of the C suite actually care about whether spending $1 for the prospect of making $1.50 is a complete waste of time and energy. And I often wonder if some of the narratives I hear about who got laid off and why are not seeing this calculus in the results.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#49F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
>So it's manual clicking for each update. You need to install the F-Droid Privileged Extension, or use a ROM that has it pre-installed. That way it can update apps without user interaction.
Ah, but it looks like that means you need to be rooted?
Re: No user accounts, by design
#50F-droid gets many things right (e.g. verifiable builds), but it's just not usable in practice. Installing applications is a rare event, updating them is frequent, and needs to disrupt the user as little as possible. Android used to not allow alternative app stores to update apps without user interaction, but now supports this through UPDATE_PACKAGES_WITHOUT_USER_ACTION, which doesn't seem to be supported by F-droid.…
> ...but it's just not usable in practice. > ...this makes using packages installed through F-Droid a nightmare. I run 2x Androids with near 80%-90% of the packages installed from F-Droid repos (to include Bromite and Bitwarden custom repos); it has quirks and is not perfect - but far from "not usable" and "nightmare" as your hyperbole would suggest.
Same here. Curation could still be better on F-Droid, but I'm very happy with it overall.
Thank you whoever is behind it, you're doing a great job.