F-Droid (FOSS Android App Store)

A Gecko-based browser just got added to recommendations and Gecko-based browsers just like F-Droid have some security concerns and issues, so I think it would be fair to revisit this.

Both F-Droid and Gecko-based browsers have some technical security concerns or issues that aren’t proven to be an issue in the real world for most people. But we recommend a Gecko-based browser and explicitly state that we currently don’t recommend F-Droid.

The only difference is that F-Droid is the only reasonable alternative to the Play Store unless you want to use Obtainium and go hunt for apks in the repos like a caveman. Meanwhile, we have 3–5 good Chromium-based browsers that we can recommend for mobile users.

Obtainium isn’t an app store, so you need to know what you’re looking for, and we also have this:

@SkewedZeppelin has also made a good point about Obtainium:

I still believe it is a huge footgun by removing the curation aspect.
Users getting random apks from GitHub repos just sets us a decade back.

Users will end up installing something they think is open source (“because GitHub”) despite being proprietary.
And users will end up installing some fake typo-squatted repo with actual malware.

6 Likes