Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ikeboy 2540 days ago
Wow, I was not aware of that. Should I delete the version I'm using?
3 comments

I learnt a nice way to answer these kind of questions for myself lately. Ask yourself the following question: One which side do you want to fail? (or on which side do you want to err?)

Do you rather have an app on your phone with access to your files that most probably runs dubious software alongside? Or, do you rather not miss out on the elegance and convenience it provides? I guess the answer depends largely on the content of your files and your personal preferences.

Interesting thought - a spammer can use the Play Store’s visible metadata on an app to decide which ones to prioritize. For example, one criteria might be, apps with lots of interesting permissions, decent number of users, but no recent updates. For such an app a spammer could increase their incentives or try more hard-sell tactics.
Not really that far fetched. It's the Raccoon blog. Raccoon, being an open source APK downloader partially reimplemens the play store app and app discovery is what that app is all about.
App works well for my purposes and haven't noticed any issues. If they've been banned from the play store then they can push any updates making it worse than it is now, and the current version doesn't appear to be malicious.

Also, Google hasn't flagged the app, which I believe they would if it was malicious as opposed to made by a company that had issues in other apps. So unless there's specific malicious behavior tracked, which I don't see, I'm not going to get rid of it.

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/ can provide information on integrated tracking SDKs per app to help you decide.

"The Lumen Privacy Monitor" developed by the ICSI Haystack Project collects statistics of outgoing tracking traffic and their app origin on your device.

If it's the free version, yes. As far as I'm aware the pro version is clean.