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Tobi823 / ffupdater

FFUpdater: Updater for privacy friendly browser
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.marmaro.krt.ffupdater
GNU General Public License v3.0
717 stars 34 forks source link

[Idea] - Vanadium Support (Hardened Chromium Browser) #404

Open bioluks opened 1 year ago

bioluks commented 1 year ago

@GrapheneOS' open-source browser which has lots of patches increasing security + privacy. Precompiled APK's weren't available for a while afaik, but @thestinger (fouder of GrapheneOS) started releasing precompiled APK's of Vanadium on a GitLab repo. It says on their GitHub repo releases that they plan to release the browser for users outside of GrapheneOS. Only downside (maybe?) for FFUpdater would be that I had to install the TriChromeLibrary before I could install the Vanadium APK (related Chromium explanation?), but I'm sure that has it's own explanation why it's needed.

Having this browser in FFUpdater would be really good, looking at the project, the security and how often it gets updated.

thestinger commented 1 year ago

Vanadium currently only officially supports GrapheneOS and is not intended to be used elsewhere. Supporting other operating systems may happen in the future but is a low priority. Vanadium uses GrapheneOS services rather than Google services and those are only currently intended for use by GrapheneOS. GrapheneOS is paying for those servers.

The platform_external_vanadium Git repository on GitLab exists only for bundling Vanadium into builds of GrapheneOS. It is not a proper way to obtain Vanadium updates. They should be obtained from our app repository.

Our app repository client has proper generic dependency handling including installing updates to groups of packages with automatic package installer sessions. It provides fully automatic updates even outside GrapheneOS using the Android 12+ unattended update support in a way that's non-disruptive because automatic updates are split into 2 separate jobs: automatic update check and automatic update installation, with automatic update installation deferred until the device is idle. It also provides alpha, beta and stable release channels along with other important features. Why do you want a third party tool for downloading and updating Vanadium when we have an official app repository with a modern app repository client?

bioluks commented 1 year ago

@thestinger Thanks for the detailed explanation in short time. I didn't know about GrapheneOS Services since I never used GrapheneOS myself, I would love to but it's more focused on Pixel development (which I totally understand with the security updates they get for a long time). I don't have a Pixel device and always found their hardware not strong enough, and since Bromite is unofficially dead now I was trying out new Browsers and thought why not Vanadium? And what's the problem with a third party tool which is open source, and gets the files from its own source (aside from GrapheneOS Services)? Again thanks for your thoughts on this, I guess it's clear that you don't want Vanadium installs outside of GrapheneOS for now.

thestinger commented 1 year ago

If you insist on using it you can install the APKs from there but you should also install the GrapheneOS app repository which will allow you to update it. It just won't appear as one of the available apps unless you already have it right now.

Tobi823 commented 1 year ago

FYI: I will add Vanadium to FFUpdater when its APK files are released to the general public (on Github)