Flatbuffers by Google – CapnProto alternative

Re:Flatbuffers by Google – CapnProto alternative by eridius on Saturday October 25, 2014 @02:58AM (#8507453)

I'm a bit confused. Is it actually calling home? That seems kind of unlikely, given that a) that seems pretty egregious for a library like this, and b) they said this doesn't affect the application at all beyond consuming "a few bytes".

Could it instead be just that Google scans Google Play apps for a string in the binary that matches the Flatbuffers version string format? That seems more likely given what the README does say about this. And it also seems more useful in general; Google would benefit more from knowing how many applications use the library than knowing how popular these applications are.

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Re:Flatbuffers by Google – CapnProto alternative by subim on Saturday October 25, 2014 @03:04AM (#8507470)

> Could it instead be just that Google scans Google Play apps for a string in the binary that matches the Flatbuffers version string format?

Of course that's what's happening: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/include/fl...

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Re:Flatbuffers by Google – CapnProto alternative by kevinbowman on Saturday October 25, 2014 @03:07AM (#8507476)

Ah yes, that's possible; I'm not sure why I leapt to that conclusion. In that case, an app which uses this library and is only published on the Amazon Android App Store would not be tracked I guess.

I actually find it kind of interesting that I mentally turned "tracked" into "calls home".

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