F-Droid

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F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.

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Overview of F-Droid apps published with Reproducible Builds · GitLab (gitlab.com)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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It's awesome there are already so many reproduxible builds on fdroid. Why aren't there more? Do devs simply not care enough? Or is it too difficult?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

It is a hard problem.

Look at the monumental effort Debian went through (or hell maybe they are also still working on it) http://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Your link is incorrect. Its "wiki." not "wili."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Crap on my head, sorry, I literally typed it out like we lost a damn war.

Thanks for correcting.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Thanks for the pointer. https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

ReproducibleBuilds (last modified 2022-02-20 01:54:19)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Link is dead

Isn't that something different?

It is already possible to make apps reproducible

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I just typoed it because I am a damn human.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Nice try bot. A human would be too lazy and would copy paste.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Few things which makes achieving reproducible/deterministic builds hard are - timestamps of generated/compiled files, continuously updating versions of build tools(+support libraries), output binary difference compiled across different OS.

We can use docker based build system for this, but it would require very carefully configured Dockerfile to keep the build tools+libraries on specific version. And if we do a pre-built Docker Image, then the Reproducibility of that Docker Image has to be proven first. It is indeed a difficult task, but not an impossible one. With F-Droid providing a sound framework for reproducible build generation, I believe we would have majority of large Android Apps reproducible in next few years.