Yes, this is part of the problem. Application developers and the packagers should be distinct unrelated entities to reduce the chance of a malicious update being pushed to users if the developer sells out.

F-Droid and Debian/etc show how this is done.

Splitting the developer and the packager doesn't inherently reduce the chance of a malicious update any more than using a VPN reduces the chance of being snooped on by an ISP. All it accomplishes is change who you have to trust to not be malicious. You might have good reason to believe that you can trust one party better than you can trust another, but unless you're building the package yourself there's still no guarantee that the package that you install is built from the source code you can inspect.

It's all based in trust in the packager and only the packager—there are no checks and balances. The only reason why splitting up the responsibilities might help is if you find the F-Droid maintainers to be inherently more trustworthy than the Signal developers, not due to simply separating the concerns.

Without reproducible builds, this just means you have to trust the packager instead of the developer. Sometimes that's a good trade-off, but you still haven't really solved the problem, just moved it.

With reproducible builds, you don't have to trust the packager or the developer as long as you trust at least one person who reviewed the source code.

Packagers have proven to be more reliable. Sometimes they make mistakes but there's no case of a packager ever selling out (correct me if I'm wrong.) On the other hand, there are numerous cases of developers selling out.

That does not solve the problem. A country can forbid F-Droid and Debian and anything else that is not in a short list of vetted app stores that comply with the law of that country to backdoor everything.

A sovereign country creating and enforcing domestic laws is not a problem that can be overcome with software.

I have unpopular opinions about this, because Signal has been so hostile to anyone other than Signal themselves being involved.

But to be specific: "open source" claims go out the window when they're;

1. Not reproducible (before anyone links me to the "reproducible steps" please actually read them because they tell you directly that they will not create a reproducible output).

2. Able to hide development of mobilecoin (somehow) from us for nearly a year. To be clear: There were updates to the Signal app on iOS and Play, otherwise there would have been security bugs, but those patches did not make their way into the repositories.

Signal operates on a "trust us bro" mentality, and no matter how trustable they seem to be- something about that doesn't sit right with me and never has.

EDIT: I don't really care if bots or shills downvote me, can you really, with a straight face, say it's NOT "trust us bro" ideology that makes people use Signal?

Can you point out where it says it won't be a reproducible output?

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reprod...

I skimmed and didn't see that but the "apkdiff" script extracting the apk because "diff doesn't work well on zips" made my gut twitch.

Why can't I sha256sum the two apk?

Archive formats are hard to make reproducible because there are lots of ways of making different yet equivalent archives. So it’s not surprising to me that someone would fail at this hurdle and find it frustrating to resolve. Nix defined their own format for this to avoid this exact problem.

It seems there are multiple reasons. For one, the apk files include a digital signature and you won't have Signal's and Google's private keys available to recreate their signatures.

Thank you for this nice response. Did you already know or did you look it up? please don't tell me you just copied and pasted my question into an input form somewhere and it gave a bunch of reasons...

i should have done that.

I was interested in this so I had a look at the tools.

Now that I asked ChatGPT, it didn't include this reason - perhaps it's too obvious and no-one has written it down before.

Ah nice; they got rid of that explicit warning - instead though we have the entire section about "bundlePlayProdRelease" including an externally sourced binary blob.

A significant improvement.

/s

I don't understand how the details of the build process matter if the resulting files can be checked to be bit by bit identical? I can only think of something like Signal and Google conspiring to backdoor the binaries during the build process via this external binary blob. But if Google is part of this, they could also do it within Android which is not fully open source.

If you don't like this, you use the non-Play Store build instead (which supposedly doesn't include any binary blobs, but I haven't checked).

> 2. Able to hide development of mobilecoin (somehow) from us for nearly a year. To be clear: There were updates to the Signal app on iOS and Play, otherwise there would have been security bugs, but those patches did not make their way into the repositories. Signal operates on a "trust us bro" mentality, and no matter how trustable they seem to be- something about that doesn't sit right with me and never has.

The MobileCoin work and the source code not being published on the public repository for nearly a year was an extremely ill thought move. It soured my view of Signal as well.

I’m throwing a +1 your way. Hiding development for a year to launch a get-rich-quick coin isn’t the way a trustworthy FOSS organization should behave.

As someone who got their whole network to switch to Signal before that happened, it was absolutely disgusting watching that all play out.

https://molly.im for a more FOSS and safer fork of Signal