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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 3 days ago by Davriellelouna@lemmy.world to c/usa@midwest.social

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[–] vatlark@lemmy.world 26 points 3 days ago (5 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.

[–] redsand@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 3 days ago (2 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 3 points 2 days 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 2 points 2 days 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.

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