this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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F-Droid
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F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.
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Yes Izzy only hosts open source apps, but their policies are more lax than of F-Droid. So they can include proprietary libraries or stuff in forks that the original devs don't want. Also Izzy takes the binaries directly, so they can't guarantee their reproducibility like F-Droid does.
Btw other repos don't need to even be for open source apps. Total Commander for Android has their own F-Droid repo too (although it doesn't work atm).
Could you explain what their "reproducibility" means?
A program is written in source code. However in order for that source code to run on your device, it has to be "complied" into a "binary". Open source apps mean that the source code is avalible, however someone still has to do the compiling. Fdroid does the compiling themselves, which means they can guarantee that the binary in their repository came from the source code, aka it is reproducible from the source code. Izzy gets the developer to compile the code themselves, which means that a malicious developer could submit a binary that's different to the source code.
Thanks!