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Google’s “Web Integrity” Android API could kill “alternative” media clients (arstechnica.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

If you are Spotify or YouTube, you could already block modified devices at the app level before the embedded WebView even boots up, via the Play Integrity API.

That's a pretty serious misconception. Regardless of whatever they do with the Play Integrity API, YouTube cannot currently stop me from installing ReVanced or some other app from F-Droid on my LineageOS phone. The idea of this new API is to prevent anything not Google-approved from playing Youtube videos, in a cryptographically secure way.

Nothing that isn't Chrome will be allowed to use Youtube without implementing this API, nothing that isn't Google-approved will be allowed to do so, and if it doesn't make it into Chrome that just means they have other plans for dealing with the problem in Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

... and come to think of it, if this does make it into Chrome (and why wouldn't it, really? WebView is just another brand name for Android Chrome) it's going to be difficult to stop any random website using it to refuse service for things that have nothing to do with the intended use case of preventing "media playback" simply by adding some otherwise irrelevant embedded media to any web page and refusing to operate if it doesn't load. Any site that wants to will be able to verify that you don't have unauthorized browser extensions, just like the original "Web Environment Integrity."

They have simply taken "Web Environment Integrity", changed its name to "Webview Media Integrity", and launched a massive press campaign to fool half the world into thinking it's not exactly the same damn thing.