IzzyOnDroid

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apps
howto
interna
markets
privacy
review
security

© William Theaker / Izzy

The previous articles showed what F-Droid is and how it works. Now we want to see how to host our own app repository, and make it available to other F-Droid users. For this task, the F-Droid team offers a fine and easy-to-use tool: Repomaker.

© Izzy

This article covers advanced topics: you can use 3rd-party repositories and have the privileged extension to take care for automated updates. Further it will be shown how new apps can be added to F-Droid.

© William Theaker / Izzy

With Google Play Store you´re tracked without end: by the Play Store itself as well as by the most apps you can find in it. But you can escape that – e.g. by turning your back to Play Store and instead use an alternative focusing on free and open software as well as privacy. One such can be found in F-Droid – which this article introduces.

© John Wu

Ever heard of Magisk? No, thats no mythical creature. This tool applies a MAGIcal maSK on top of the read-only system partition, which enables us to do some interesting things. Some of them you will find in this article.

It has been around for quite a while, but was never introduced in an article here. Time for a few words on the „IzzyOnDroid F-Droid Repo“ and what it offers.

© Richard Scott (CC)

Most apps ship with additional modules. Some of those are required for the functionality, others are not. While still serving a justified purpose, they come at a cost. This article will take a deeper look at this second category.

© Wikipedia

App reviews and security reports mention them regularly: identifiers which apps like to access. Identitifying information picked from the device and „getting transfered to somewhere“. In this context, terms like „Google Adverising ID“ or „Android ID“ are referenced. What do they mean? And what other „identifiers“ are there, which purposes do they serve?

© Karlis Dambrans / Izzy

We´ve already got our privacy concerns with out smartphones: Will apps leak our personal data? How much do embedded ad-modules collect? Are we already „glass people“ to the big players? So considering smartwatches communicate with our Android devices, adding even more personal data (just think of the health apps), aren´t the terms „smartwatch“ and „privacy“ rather antagonisms? A short test.

© Wikipedia

IzzyOnDroid now is in its third year of existence, having collected app data since its start. With over 13.000 apps listed here: Is there anything we can learn about them from those data? I´d say we can, and this article will show what. Read on!

© William Theaker

Most of you probably have already heard of F-Droid, the completely open-source „store“ for Android apps. Some might even know there’s more than one repository you can use with their app. But when it comes to the question for a list of them, answers are rare. Here’s one of them.