Was curious so Iooked up the app’s site.
Apparently the devs claim they can’t release it on Android because “There’s no way to be anonymous on the play store”, but it’s even more impossible to be anonymous on the platform they’ve released. That’s how you know the developer is incredibly stupid and/or shady as hell- because they’ve never even heard of Fdroid?
Makes me think the app is a troll/trojan horse (not as in infection, trojan horse as in it has alterior motives)
The Drumpf crew “losing it” over the app just makes it more questionable. They love to create a firestorm so people talk about the thing “they definitely don’t want you to use!!” to get people to do things…
they mentioned that its because push notifications require device id and that would make it easy to be tracked if aubpoenaed.
https://bsky.app/profile/iceblock.app/post/3lmzykc7rb42d
edit: for the record i don’t agree; i’m just saying what they said on bsky
I’m not sure if this guy is just dumb or it’s a honeypot.
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As mentioned elsewhere, they don’t use device ID
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Android is the only platform that supports alternative push methods
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Apple knows everyone who downloads this app, which is subject to subpoena
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The gov has been collecting push notification data from both Apple and Google for a long time. It would be as simple as knowing when notifications went out and then comparing timestamps to figure out who is using the app.
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The app is closed-source
It would take significantly more mental energy on the part of the user but it would be far safer (which is extremely important in this specific case, as the dev agrees) to distribute through F-Droid and then use some other UnifiedPush implementation, as many Android apps already do. Anyone using this app is painting a huge target on their backs for the current authoritarian state.
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Anyone have a link to the app/website? I’d like to follow some among honing my horn and warning folks.
Is this only on Apple? Kind of lame.
This is IOS only owing to Android play store collecting a device identifier; the creator wanted complete anonymity
Quote from some other place people were discussing it. Unfortunately no source on it.
There are other stores besides the playstore…
It’s not about the store, it’s about the notification.
As mentioned in the Time article:
the app is not available on Android because it “requires a device ID in order to send push notifications, which requires a user account and a password.”
You don’t need a user account or password to receive a push notification.
You just need to have the app installed. The app can be configured by the developer to receive push notifications.
And the developer needs a device ID for that. Which is their objection: https://www.iceblock.app/android
