As lead maintainer of the official #FDroid client, I hear a lot of criticism that #targetSdkVersion is still at 25. fdroidclient is #FreeSoftware, publicly audited, with #ReproducibleBuilds, written in memory safe languages, with a proven record of respecting #privacy and delivering #security. The source and binaries also receive human and machine review. #targetSdkVersion is designed around untrusted proprietary software with non-memory safe code where the binary only gets machine review. 1/2
When #FDroid is built into a #FreeSoftware ROM, like #CalyxOS, #lineageos for #microg, etc there is no popup warning with fdroidclient. That comes from "Play Protect", which is #Google proprietary software that flags things based on automated rules, it does not point to real world security concerns for apps like #FDroid. I have nothing against the #targetSdkVersion sandbox, I just think it is important to note what it is good for, and what it cannot do well 2/2
We welcome help for bumping the #targetSdkVersionfor #FDroid and have mapped out what needs to be done:
* https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2037
* https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/1440
Given our limited resources, I have chosen to focus my time on concrete improvements for #FreeSoftware. The only thing I'm opposed to in all this is removing functionality in order to bump targetSdkVersion. Google's recent changes there have removed functionality that many rely on.