Awesome app. It is somehow not listed on android-foss list so maybe someone didn’t know about it.
Obtainium allows you to install and update Open-Source Apps directly from their releases pages, and receive notifications when new releases are made available.
GitHub page: Link.
F-Droid installs an APK that F-Droid compiled. Obtainium installs an APK that the app developer themselves compiled. I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
Malicious APKs, built by the developer themselves, not matching their public source code.
Which developer?
E: Lol @ the ninja edit.
That’s hardly a meaningful advantage for f-droid and the whole man in the middle risk you’re exposing yourself to there. If you don’t trust the developer to do the bare minimum of providing a release that matches source then why are you even installing their app? Satyr’s response about developers getting compromised has way more weight in that conversation, but still falls short IMO.
Making sure the apk matches public source and running it through VT aren’t going to catch a malicious apk that has the nasty bits buried in various commits but checks out in VT and matches the public source code. Sure, it’ll burn them as a developer if/when they get caught, but how often does the community truly do code reviews on one-off Android apps? Not often enough to catch that kinda thing before it spreads without getting insanely lucky.
If you think about it, any developer could have their account hacked and the attacker upload an APK that includes malware. Obtainium isn’t doing any malware scan or building from source or anything. If you are planning to just install from GitHub anyway, Obtainium should be a no-brainer. But I can see where might argue that having a middleman like F-Droid to validate APK integrity has some merits.
https://f-droid.org/docs/Security_Model/
