I’ve been just not updating Nova as I haven’t had a ton of time to research this, I really like the GUI, what are my privacy friendly/FOSS options for an android s21 5G?
Update: Went with Neo launcher. It’s got enough of the features that I’m willing to use it.
There are a few spots where padding can’t be removed that is obnoxious, FF search bar and dock are what I have noticed so far.
I also don’t like that I can’t continuosly scroll through my home screens.
Thanks, I know about reproducible builds, but I still don’t see how the GitHub release is more secure than the F-Droid build. In both cases you need to trust whoever built the apk.
It is known that F-Droid uses the published source code, reviews it for anti-features, and they build hundreds of apps used by thousands of people. If they did any tampering or had a security hole we would learn about it pretty fast (we just need one user of one of their built apps to report).
On the other hand using a GitHub release we need to trust the developer of the app: trust that the source code has no malicious code in it (or review the code ourselves, does anybody do that?), there’s no third party reviewing it, and trust that the apk they release uses exactly the published code. The user base of an individual app’s GitHub release is way smaller than that of all apps built by F-Droid, so by chance it would take way longer for users to detect any security problem.
So, as I see it, it boils down to either trusting a big community with a long story of building and providing FOSS apps, a good reputation, and offering reproducible builds on all apps that managed to achieve them; or trusting dozens of different developers, most of whom we know nothing of.