IzzyOnDroid

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Mastodon Logo © Jin Nguyen (Wikipedia)

Mastodon probably is the best-known service of the Fediverse. It is a Microblogging service often compared to Twitter (a comparison not covering all aspects, of course). How does Mastodon differ, where does it excel and how you can use it? This article should shed some light.

CC BY-SA; source: Wikipedia

What most mainstream „social networks“ have in common: they are proprietary, centralised, and commercialize their user’s data. You mustn’t think „that’s just the way it is“. The Fediverse shows there are other ways. Never heard of it? Read on!

© Exodus Privacy (CC-BY-SA)

Meanwhile, at least two thirds of all Android Apps are tracker ridden. Even the paid ones. More than ten trackers in a single app are no rare cases – even apps with 20 or more than 30 trackers have already turned up. And they endangering our privacy. Play Store doesn’t point them out – but thanks to Exodus Privacy, we track them down.

© 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?