Found this notification this morning on my pixel 6.

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[+] 32 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (21 children)
  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (3 children)
    • Fennec - Firefox build with some proprietary stiff removed; repo
    • IronFox - Firefox fork (forked from Mull) with a bunch of hardening changes (notably resistFingerprinting enabled); repo

    IronFox is more ambitious, which means higher maintenance load and more likely to fall behind. Fennec is much simpler, so less likely to fall behind, but also doesn't change much from Firefox.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (16 children)

    I've not heard of ironfox before this thread! Could you possibly link it? Doesn't seem like it's on FDroid or IzzyOnDroid

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (10 children)

    In addition to what others have said, it can be downloaded from the Accrescent app store:

    https://accrescent.app/

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    Never heard of that, what's the benefit over F-Droid?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    The main difference is of philosophy of trust. With F-droid you trust F-droid to build the binary from the developers' source code. With Accrescent, you trust the developers to build the binary from the source code.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    So Accrescent is more like the classic play store or Obtainium?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    In the play store you're trusting Google and the developer.

    I'm not sure how obtainium works. But if you download binaries from GitHub, you're trusting the developer to accurately build their source code into the binary without adding anything. You're also trusting GitHub implicitly -- way back when, source forge was sometimes adding malware to downloads iirc.

    F-droid is kind of cool in that they are saying, "we will ensure for you that the code you execute is the same as the open source code you can read". But this added level of insurance comes with downsides -- like sometimes it's harder for the developer to make their code build properly, or maybe updates take longer.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    And here I'm trusting Accrescent to actually deliver me an executable that has not been tampered with

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    Yes you are trusting them, and the developer. Just like you are trusting F-droid if you download from them. You also have to trust that the compiler program doesn't do anything fishy. It's trust all the way down.

    The good news is that lots of people are working on making the systems trustworthy, and you as a consumer can learn to distinguish between what can be trusted for your usecase and what can't.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    With F-droid you trust F-droid to build the binary from the developers' source code

    Not when using a self-hosted F-Droid Repo - which is the case for Ironfox.

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  • I wish more projects hosted their own F-droid repo and kept it up to date. FUTO has one for their stuff (Grayjay, FUTO Keyboard, etc), but it's frequently outdated, whereas Bitwarden and a few others I use do a good job.

    Maybe Accrescent is what I'm looking for. I just want a store that:

    • automatically updates when devs push a release
    • checks signatures
    • has a good selection of FOSS apps

    I basically want fdroid, but faster updates.

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