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ICEblock, which allows users to alert others to the location of ICE officers, is now the top social networking app in the US (www.engadget.com)

submitted 1 day ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to c/usa@midwest.social

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[–] vatlark@lemmy.world 24 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The app is only available on iOS, because it would have to collect information on Android that could put people at risk.

I would be curious to learn more about how the OS requires an app to collect data.

[–] darksiderbun@lemmy.ca 21 points 23 hours ago

Play store requires a home address for app downloads, both for the publisher and any users, so it would allow precise targeting of people if they ask google to disclose the information. No idea why this isn’t published on F-Droid though .

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 19 hours ago

They mean push notifications where you need to store a device identifying URL to push your notifications to.

If traceability is a concern, using the native iOS notifications is not much better, you just move the burden to Apple (which I assume will be more than happy to cooperate, given they're an American corporate), so nothing is really solved.

The only good solution is your own backend which knows nothing and each app installation maintains a permanent WebSocket connection, then you push them to each client.

[–] redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

They're iOS devs and probably don't want or know how to do a java project. This can 100% be on fdroid. If anyone knows kotlin or otherwise wants to build the thing please link the github for us.

[–] thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz 2 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Their explanation for why it can't be on Android is that the nature of Android push notifications is such that they (the developers) would need to maintain a database of device IDs that could be tied back to physical devices and potentially be used to deanonymize which users received which alerts.

To me, this sounds lazy and like something that could be mitigated with End-To-End encryption.

[–] redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

Yeah they're Apple devs who don't understand Apple was caught in the same push notification scandal. The small technical differences don't matter. Push notifications can have interchangeable providers or none at all now on android.

Someone please help them, I bet their unit tests are nonexistent.