> SmartTube’s developer told me that the computer used to create the APKs for the project’s official GitHub page was compromised by malware. As a result, some official SmartTube releases were unintentionally released with malware.
Seems it's lacking in information about how a malware manages to compromise supposedly signed releases? Do authors not have the production signing keys behind a password or similar, and review 100% of the changes before they deploy stuff?
I swear the more time goes on, the more I'm loosing faith in the entire ecosystem. People running random binaries on the same device they do banking on always surprised me, but now developers manages to get malware on their developer machine and are publishing random binaries to other strangers???
the malware need not actively create a release like a worm, it can just infect every build and if you don't check carefully, your next regular release will contain it.
Announcement from the dev, in the project GitHub and Patreon:
Friends, it seems that my digital signature has been exposed. This signature protects the app from fake and malicious updates, so there is a risk that someone may try to release counterfeit versions under my name.
To completely eliminate any threats, I’ve decided to stop using the current signature and switch to a new one. Because of this, the app’s identifier will also change. You don’t need to delete the old app (but it will no longer receive updates) — the new one will install as a separate app and will need to be configured again.
Thank you for your understanding and attention to security.[1][2]
---------------
There aren't any new apk releases on GitHub yet. However, concerningly, the SmartTube website (which I won't link directly) still offers undated "Stable" and "Beta" downloads.
It sucks to deal with security breaches as an indie or solo dev, but I'll be waiting for a more detailed postmortem before assessing whether to install a future release... Hopefully one that details new security procedures to guard both the dev's key and the production build environment.
Factory resetting my Shield as a precaution, but nothing sensitive was really on there, and Android's security model did exactly what it was supposed to and limited the damage. When using a third party app like this, it's prudent to use it signed out or else with a purpose specific Google/YouTube account which is connected to nothing else critical.
Blocking file-based installations was never planned. It's fake news and always has been. It's all about requiring code signing for all code so that malware-spreading authors can be easily blocked by adding their signing key fingerprint to the blocklist.
It doesn't matter whether the app is installed via Play Store, Huawei's or Samsung's store etc., or from APK.
It's not just cost and ads. It's having the possibility to reduce attempts to manipulate my inner reptile brain. With various clients, you can disable shorts, recommended, you have sponsorblock, you can replace youtube-face-thumbs with actual thumbs and get crowd-sourced titles that better reflect the contents.
I also don't need to manually go set speed to 1.75x and enable subs in english, it's a one-time setting. _Further_ I can download a video locally, for whatever reason (later viewing, bw throttling, risk of deletion, etc).
As if that weren't enough, I don't have to watch videos logged in, my client is just set up to download my select channels.
Is $14 dollars for ad-free, unlimited access to literally billions of videos really a steep price? Personally if I were to get rid of all but one of my media subscriptions I would stick with this one, since it's got everything - entertainment, education, inspiration, you name it.
$14 is two days worth of living in my country for your average man on the street, among many other similar places. Imagine if you had to pay $200 to watch YouTube, that's how much these services cost for us.
They refuse to correct for purchasing power parity and are left with nothing in the end. Steam seems to do very well in comparison.
(I don't watch YouTube even for free, but practically everybody I know does without paying anything, and it makes a lot of sense).
There are a lot of things in this world besides YouTube Premium, which cost $14 or more. That some people in the world are very poor is no kind of argument as to how companies should price their products.
"Purchasing power parity" is a non-concept for almost 100% of companies and products. But YouTube Premium is priced differently in different regions. Sometimes much cheaper than $14.
The person you're responding to is not debating that the companies are setting the wrong prices, so no need to try to convince them that the companies are already setting prices "the right way".
They're explaining for people who don't seem to understand, why people are fine signing in to these kind of 3rd party apps in the first place, because the subscription price ends up being what these people earn in days, not hours.
YouTube is 10x the quality and 10x the quantity than any other video service.
As for the ads, YouTube Premium now has built-in sponsor skip. They can't really block sponsored segments, as that is a freedom of speech issue and also something they can't easily determine. Creators can just omit that some product is sponsored.
> YouTube is 10x the quality and 10x the quantity than any other video service.
I guess you could say YouTube surfaces a larger span of quality, from really shit quality to incredible high quality, which I guess is cool. But since they provide zero tools to actually discover the really high quality, and on top of that decide they know better what I want to watch than me (like the subscriptions page not starting with the last published video), does that really matter?
> as that is a freedom of speech issue
It isn't. Freedom of speech in the US (since Google is based there, and maybe you too?) is about the government placing restrictions, not companies or individuals. As a individual (or company), you're free to limit the speech of anyone who want on your platform, for any reason. You might face public outcry, but it isn't a freedom of speech issue as it's on a private platform in the first place.
They provide all the tools to discover high quality videos and channels. It's called "like and subscribe". If you use those features, it doesn't take long before YouTube shows you only high quality videos. And there's also the dislike button and "Do not recommend this channel again", if you need.
> Freedom of speech in the US...
Freedom of speech is a subject which is much larger than the US constitution. I'm not saying YouTube isn't legally allowed to block sponsored segments. I'm saying that they might not want to because they don't want to limit their creators' speech in that matter. Especially considering how easy it would be to side-step. What would be their reason? They've already made it easy to skip sponsored segments.
Youtube is both 10x and 0.1x the quality, and the official app has no way to filter it. They even removed the feature (downvotes) to let the user filter it.
And the proliferation of AI videoslop is only making the 0.1x side larger and larger
It's >12x the ad revenue they bring in per monthly-active YouTube user (suggesting they'd still be happy with a much lower price), and the price has increased 75% in the last decade (compared to the 40% real inflation over that period, suggesting they intend to continue increasing the price till public backlash or other effects reduce their total revenue). Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users, and we'll see how far that initiative goes.
> Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users
Do you have a source for this?
I do value watching unlimited youtube videos without ads, but if they're gonna add the ads back in, I'd easily stop paying for the one google product I currently pay for (and honestly the only reason I haven't already done this is laziness and convenience)
It launched at $9.99[1] and is now $13.99[2] which I believe to be a 40% increase, i.e. flat in real dollars. If like most people you subscribe for a year, it's only $11.67/mo.
Not to mention included YouTube Music. It's one of the few subs I pay for, because I watch a _lot_ of YouTube on the TV. And also like to have it in the background for "Podcast" style videos where the video is really only an accompaniment.
That's actually worse. They used to have a separate YouTube subscription. I don't want (to pay for) YouTube Music, because I already have Apple Music and Tidal, which I prefer.
That's extremely subjective, but I'd rather save that $14 a month towards retirement. And if YouTube was only available with ads... well, that's no videos for me, maybe for the better, I would waste less time.
Insane hyperbole here, this guy's adblock = risking humanity losing it's 2nd most important platform owned by one of the most profitable companies in the world
OpenAI thought of it first, should YouTube get a government backstop too?
I am dubious about the importance of Youtube. If it disappeared tomorrow how long would it take for most videos to reappear elsewhere? Some of the creators I watch do have the videos available elsewhere. Veritasium is on Odysee, lots of people are on Nebula (and release videos there that are not on Youtube), etc.
I think there is a good argument that having a single dominant platform has been harmful.
Let’s not get too hasty comparing YouTube to Wikipedia. Maybe what you watch on YouTube is interesting and educational, but let’s not forget it’s also a major platform for misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, radicalisation, scams…
basically, yeah. there's a white fast forward button that appears during frequently fast forwarded sections, which unsurprisingly happens to be sponsor sections.
That's a very generous characterization of what most YouTube content is.
My experience is that you are basically paying to remove the official ads from your disguised ads.
The various algorithm tweaks for engagement these past few years and the introduction of shorts have significantly degraded the content quality and many good channels have just thrown the towel.
Sometimes people download it because there's no alternative. E.g. the YT app is not available in the play store in their country on that specific hardware, so the only way to be able to view YT is to use an alternative app like this one.
I can't help but think that this is a "I have nothing to hide" argument. It's quite sisyphean to keep accounts perfectly segregated, therefore there's always a chance that personal information can be traced back and pieced together; which, in turn, has "boring-old security" implications: i.e., now someone possibly knows your habbits and times when you are at work
Many people have had multiple gmail accounts since 2004.
I have a gmail account used solely for google store and Android TV related verifications that's unlike other business, personal, registration, or spam email accounts.
The TV's in the house, smart wifi devices, and guest wifi accounts are on separate subnets, the NAS hosted media has limited read only keyhole access accounts for TV apps to use.
Whether it's SmartTube or any other app (iView, SBSOnline, Netflix, etc) it's wise to assume that anyone can be comprised by malware to sniff traffic for (say) bank account passwords, host bots for DDOS or mining, etc.
You risk losing your entire Google account along with all documents, photos, mail, and whatever else you have there. Enough stories of this happening if you look around.
> Also are you really using same account for gmail, your personal pictures/docs and youtube?
Most people use "sign in with Google" and tie their Google account to services well beyond the Google ecosystem, just to avoid creating a new entry in their password manager (lol). You think people are making new Google accounts for each Google service? That's hard for me to believe.
This will inevitably be used as ammunition against sideloading, but it’s really a lesson in supply chain trust.
When we move away from walled gardens (which I support), the burden of verifying the "chain of custody" shifts to the user. Installing an APK that auto-updates with root/system privileges is essentially giving a single developer the keys to your living room.
We need better intermediate trust models—like reproducible builds signed by a quorum of maintainers—rather than just "trust this GitHub release."
A lot of people installed malware and, to be honest, nothing really happened. They might have had to change their passwords, but it could have been much much worse if Android didn't have good sandboxing.
I hope that Flatpak and similar technologies are adopted more widely on desktop computers. With such security technology existing, giving every application full access to the system is no longer appropriate.
The official announcement is very sparse on details. If the developer doesn't know how his digital signature (and update infrastructure?) was compromised, how does switching to a new signature help? It could get compromised in the exact same way.
The article linked here brings some more details, but also, the official statement doesn't use the word "compromised". If it did, well it would be a statement with different meaning than the one that was released for us to read.
> Do not download SmartTube from any app store, APK websites or blogs; these were uploaded by other people and may contain malware or ads. SmartTube is not officially published on any app store. Sadly, the Google PlayStore does not allow ad-free Youtube apps using unofficial APIs.
Maybe should actually switch to releasing via F-Droid.
That's exactly why I didn't want to trust this app with a google account, it's mandatory to use it. SmartTube also requires permission to install applications for it's updater feature so it's also possible if the attack was targeted for the malware to install another app to get persistance.
Although it's very unfortunate this happened, and it shows a lack of security practices, this could happen to any all developer. Compromising other apps you do install.
On my TV the app vanished and after some searching, it was disabled. I was kinda afraid Google had finally (ab)used it's Play Services power to ban it. But luckily it was because the developer marked it as compromised. All and all impact was minimised this way.
I doubt your statement about requiring a Google account to be connected, as you can also import subscriptions instead of granting access to your account.
The internal auto updater of the app directly use github as source, was this also compromised ? If malware was only on some random apkmirror upload then it should probably be fine for most users.
I think this comment relates to the fact that article mentions AFTNews Updater app as a way to install SmartTube... not yet released version of software?
> SmartTube’s developer told me that the computer used to create the APKs for the project’s official GitHub page was compromised by malware. As a result, some official SmartTube releases were unintentionally released with malware.
Seems it's lacking in information about how a malware manages to compromise supposedly signed releases? Do authors not have the production signing keys behind a password or similar, and review 100% of the changes before they deploy stuff?
I swear the more time goes on, the more I'm loosing faith in the entire ecosystem. People running random binaries on the same device they do banking on always surprised me, but now developers manages to get malware on their developer machine and are publishing random binaries to other strangers???
the malware need not actively create a release like a worm, it can just infect every build and if you don't check carefully, your next regular release will contain it.
Announcement from the dev, in the project GitHub and Patreon:
Friends, it seems that my digital signature has been exposed. This signature protects the app from fake and malicious updates, so there is a risk that someone may try to release counterfeit versions under my name.
To completely eliminate any threats, I’ve decided to stop using the current signature and switch to a new one. Because of this, the app’s identifier will also change. You don’t need to delete the old app (but it will no longer receive updates) — the new one will install as a separate app and will need to be configured again.
Thank you for your understanding and attention to security.[1][2]
---------------
There aren't any new apk releases on GitHub yet. However, concerningly, the SmartTube website (which I won't link directly) still offers undated "Stable" and "Beta" downloads.
It sucks to deal with security breaches as an indie or solo dev, but I'll be waiting for a more detailed postmortem before assessing whether to install a future release... Hopefully one that details new security procedures to guard both the dev's key and the production build environment.
Factory resetting my Shield as a precaution, but nothing sensitive was really on there, and Android's security model did exactly what it was supposed to and limited the damage. When using a third party app like this, it's prudent to use it signed out or else with a purpose specific Google/YouTube account which is connected to nothing else critical.
[1]: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube/releases/tag/notificat...
[2]: https://www.patreon.com/posts/important-144473602
I really hope Google doesn't pick this out (and similar events) as further justification for getting rid of APK-based installation.
Blocking file-based installations was never planned. It's fake news and always has been. It's all about requiring code signing for all code so that malware-spreading authors can be easily blocked by adding their signing key fingerprint to the blocklist.
It doesn't matter whether the app is installed via Play Store, Huawei's or Samsung's store etc., or from APK.
It's kind of shocking to me that so many people would download an app like this and sign in using their actual YouTube account.
It's not just cost and ads. It's having the possibility to reduce attempts to manipulate my inner reptile brain. With various clients, you can disable shorts, recommended, you have sponsorblock, you can replace youtube-face-thumbs with actual thumbs and get crowd-sourced titles that better reflect the contents.
I also don't need to manually go set speed to 1.75x and enable subs in english, it's a one-time setting. _Further_ I can download a video locally, for whatever reason (later viewing, bw throttling, risk of deletion, etc).
As if that weren't enough, I don't have to watch videos logged in, my client is just set up to download my select channels.
I now see zero use of a youtube account.
The cost of being brainwashed by ads and sponsor slots is also high.
Even with YouTube Premium you don’t get the feature set you get with SmartTube. The sponsor block integration on my TV is brilliant.
I think it's more shocking to people how much YouTube Premium costs.
Is $14 dollars for ad-free, unlimited access to literally billions of videos really a steep price? Personally if I were to get rid of all but one of my media subscriptions I would stick with this one, since it's got everything - entertainment, education, inspiration, you name it.
$14 is two days worth of living in my country for your average man on the street, among many other similar places. Imagine if you had to pay $200 to watch YouTube, that's how much these services cost for us.
They refuse to correct for purchasing power parity and are left with nothing in the end. Steam seems to do very well in comparison.
(I don't watch YouTube even for free, but practically everybody I know does without paying anything, and it makes a lot of sense).
There are a lot of things in this world besides YouTube Premium, which cost $14 or more. That some people in the world are very poor is no kind of argument as to how companies should price their products.
"Purchasing power parity" is a non-concept for almost 100% of companies and products. But YouTube Premium is priced differently in different regions. Sometimes much cheaper than $14.
The person you're responding to is not debating that the companies are setting the wrong prices, so no need to try to convince them that the companies are already setting prices "the right way".
They're explaining for people who don't seem to understand, why people are fine signing in to these kind of 3rd party apps in the first place, because the subscription price ends up being what these people earn in days, not hours.
A semi-successful YouTuber in a low-income country is basically an infinite money hack. Neat little form of advance scouting, like this forum.
I am not going to watch billions of Videos.
Its not entirely ad free, just fewer ads, AFAIK sponsored segments remain so there are still ads, sometimes quite lengthy ones.
$14/month is $168 an year, and if you subscribe to multiple other video services the annual total is going to be quite high.
YouTube is 10x the quality and 10x the quantity than any other video service.
As for the ads, YouTube Premium now has built-in sponsor skip. They can't really block sponsored segments, as that is a freedom of speech issue and also something they can't easily determine. Creators can just omit that some product is sponsored.
> YouTube is 10x the quality and 10x the quantity than any other video service.
I guess you could say YouTube surfaces a larger span of quality, from really shit quality to incredible high quality, which I guess is cool. But since they provide zero tools to actually discover the really high quality, and on top of that decide they know better what I want to watch than me (like the subscriptions page not starting with the last published video), does that really matter?
> as that is a freedom of speech issue
It isn't. Freedom of speech in the US (since Google is based there, and maybe you too?) is about the government placing restrictions, not companies or individuals. As a individual (or company), you're free to limit the speech of anyone who want on your platform, for any reason. You might face public outcry, but it isn't a freedom of speech issue as it's on a private platform in the first place.
They provide all the tools to discover high quality videos and channels. It's called "like and subscribe". If you use those features, it doesn't take long before YouTube shows you only high quality videos. And there's also the dislike button and "Do not recommend this channel again", if you need.
> Freedom of speech in the US...
Freedom of speech is a subject which is much larger than the US constitution. I'm not saying YouTube isn't legally allowed to block sponsored segments. I'm saying that they might not want to because they don't want to limit their creators' speech in that matter. Especially considering how easy it would be to side-step. What would be their reason? They've already made it easy to skip sponsored segments.
Youtube is both 10x and 0.1x the quality, and the official app has no way to filter it. They even removed the feature (downvotes) to let the user filter it.
And the proliferation of AI videoslop is only making the 0.1x side larger and larger
SponsorBlock helps with them.
I do not use it because I do want to support the people I watch. I just skip manually if it is of no interest.
It's >12x the ad revenue they bring in per monthly-active YouTube user (suggesting they'd still be happy with a much lower price), and the price has increased 75% in the last decade (compared to the 40% real inflation over that period, suggesting they intend to continue increasing the price till public backlash or other effects reduce their total revenue). Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users, and we'll see how far that initiative goes.
> Plus they're boiling the frog, slowly adding ads back in to music and shorts for premium users
Do you have a source for this?
I do value watching unlimited youtube videos without ads, but if they're gonna add the ads back in, I'd easily stop paying for the one google product I currently pay for (and honestly the only reason I haven't already done this is laziness and convenience)
> the price has increased 75% in the last decade
It launched at $9.99[1] and is now $13.99[2] which I believe to be a 40% increase, i.e. flat in real dollars. If like most people you subscribe for a year, it's only $11.67/mo.
1: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/youtube-free...
2: https://www.youtube.com/premium
When the alternative is the exact same thing you describe but for $0 dollars, then yes.
Not to mention included YouTube Music. It's one of the few subs I pay for, because I watch a _lot_ of YouTube on the TV. And also like to have it in the background for "Podcast" style videos where the video is really only an accompaniment.
That's actually worse. They used to have a separate YouTube subscription. I don't want (to pay for) YouTube Music, because I already have Apple Music and Tidal, which I prefer.
This is not accurate. The entire time that YouTube Premium (Red) existed, a subscription to it always included the music service.
That's extremely subjective, but I'd rather save that $14 a month towards retirement. And if YouTube was only available with ads... well, that's no videos for me, maybe for the better, I would waste less time.
Sure, and you're free to
1. Save $14 for retirement and not watch Youtube
2. Save $14 for retirement and watch Youtube with ads
3. Pay $14 a month for Youtube without ads
The only option that's not fair is expecting private companies and creators to give you entertainment and its delivery with nothing in return
Google uses your data and habits for profit. Dont pretend it's free.
Google is free to block me / my IP / ban my account.
I get cat videos through messengers.
14 dollars a month for a decade is $1680.
To save $1680 I'd prefer to just use an adblocker (which I have done for the past decade)
The hacker boy one day came back from school panting, sweating and exhausted. His father asked him:
- What happened to you?
- I figured that if I ran behind the bus, I'll save the $3 dollars the ticket costs-
The hacker father smacked his son hard on the head and cried:
- You fool! To run behind a bus like that! You should have ran behind a taxi instead and you would have saved at least $50 dollars!
Then they both watched YouTube together the rest of the evening, thinking eagerly about all the juicy money they would save over the next decade.
3 dollars is like a week of bus fares here and I remember a friend would walk back home from school to keep half the money.
Yes, and you choose to risk losing the most important platform to humanity next to Wikipedia. Youtube should be a public service.
Insane hyperbole here, this guy's adblock = risking humanity losing it's 2nd most important platform owned by one of the most profitable companies in the world
OpenAI thought of it first, should YouTube get a government backstop too?
I am dubious about the importance of Youtube. If it disappeared tomorrow how long would it take for most videos to reappear elsewhere? Some of the creators I watch do have the videos available elsewhere. Veritasium is on Odysee, lots of people are on Nebula (and release videos there that are not on Youtube), etc.
I think there is a good argument that having a single dominant platform has been harmful.
Let’s not get too hasty comparing YouTube to Wikipedia. Maybe what you watch on YouTube is interesting and educational, but let’s not forget it’s also a major platform for misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, radicalisation, scams…
YouTube wouldn't exist as a public service. there would be no incentive to make videos
Why wouldn't there be incentives? If you are thinking monetary then the existence of youtube disproves your statement.
$14 and I still have to run several plugins just to make the site actually usable. No thanks.
> for ad-free
Most youtube content being disguised ads, this cannot be true.
For something that was previously free with only unintrusive ads, yes.
>ad-free
hasn't been in over a year
Youtube premium is still ad-free. There is a Youtube premium lite which is kinda-ad-free-but-not-really, but the full ad-free one still exists.
youtube premium has sponsorblock integrated now?
basically, yeah. there's a white fast forward button that appears during frequently fast forwarded sections, which unsurprisingly happens to be sponsor sections.
??? I've been on youtube premium / redtube since the beginning and I've been served 1 ad incorrectly in that time.
> YouTube premium / redtube
I just googled redtube and uh... are you sure?
YouTube Premium was originally called YouTube Red. Grandparent poster may have made a Freudian slip. :)
I know, I was just being... sassy. Partly because I didn't actually need to google it.
YouTube Red was the previous name of YouTube Premium, probably renamed because of the unfortunate name clash you just noticed.
$14 dollars better spent on liberapay
I hate google, and I refuse to give them any money.
That's a very generous characterization of what most YouTube content is.
My experience is that you are basically paying to remove the official ads from your disguised ads.
The various algorithm tweaks for engagement these past few years and the introduction of shorts have significantly degraded the content quality and many good channels have just thrown the towel.
I have premium but also this app. It has SponsorBlock and better UI customization than the official one.
Sometimes people download it because there's no alternative. E.g. the YT app is not available in the play store in their country on that specific hardware, so the only way to be able to view YT is to use an alternative app like this one.
> the only way to be able to view YT
Surely you can use a web browser?
The user experience accessing YouTube through a web browser on a TV (the main target audience for SmartTube) is less than ideal.
TV and set-top box browsers tend to be slow and fiddly to use from a TV remote. (And often running on underpowered hardware).
Google Account.
Not Youtube account.
I really couldn't care less about me youtube account
I can't help but think that this is a "I have nothing to hide" argument. It's quite sisyphean to keep accounts perfectly segregated, therefore there's always a chance that personal information can be traced back and pieced together; which, in turn, has "boring-old security" implications: i.e., now someone possibly knows your habbits and times when you are at work
my "personal" information there is as personal as my profile here
thats super cool! some people care a lot, some people dont care at all. what a strange world.
YouTube accounts and Google accounts have been one in the same since 2009.
Many people have had multiple gmail accounts since 2004.
I have a gmail account used solely for google store and Android TV related verifications that's unlike other business, personal, registration, or spam email accounts.
The TV's in the house, smart wifi devices, and guest wifi accounts are on separate subnets, the NAS hosted media has limited read only keyhole access accounts for TV apps to use.
Whether it's SmartTube or any other app (iView, SBSOnline, Netflix, etc) it's wise to assume that anyone can be comprised by malware to sniff traffic for (say) bank account passwords, host bots for DDOS or mining, etc.
You don't use a dedicated account for youtube?
one AND the same
Obligatory call to free yourselves from having GMail as your (only) main email and especially to not tie it to YT or other unrelated services.
I can absolutely imagine my YT accounts at some point getting banned for using adblock, some stupid private upload or some comment.
Having your own domain name is the best option (ideally not hosting on gsuite!)
how does this matter?
You risk losing your entire Google account along with all documents, photos, mail, and whatever else you have there. Enough stories of this happening if you look around.
The risk always exist.
Also are you really using same account for gmail, your personal pictures/docs and youtube?
> Also are you really using same account for gmail, your personal pictures/docs and youtube?
Most people use "sign in with Google" and tie their Google account to services well beyond the Google ecosystem, just to avoid creating a new entry in their password manager (lol). You think people are making new Google accounts for each Google service? That's hard for me to believe.
Not necessarily everyone but I would expect the population visiting hacker news to do so.
you risk that regardless, which is why I don't rely on them at all
This will inevitably be used as ammunition against sideloading, but it’s really a lesson in supply chain trust.
When we move away from walled gardens (which I support), the burden of verifying the "chain of custody" shifts to the user. Installing an APK that auto-updates with root/system privileges is essentially giving a single developer the keys to your living room.
We need better intermediate trust models—like reproducible builds signed by a quorum of maintainers—rather than just "trust this GitHub release."
A lot of people installed malware and, to be honest, nothing really happened. They might have had to change their passwords, but it could have been much much worse if Android didn't have good sandboxing.
I hope that Flatpak and similar technologies are adopted more widely on desktop computers. With such security technology existing, giving every application full access to the system is no longer appropriate.
Why do you need Flatpak for sandboxing?
I really dislike Flatpak for installing multiple identical copies of the dependencies.
Just give me some easier to use tools to configure the access that each application has.
The official announcement is very sparse on details. If the developer doesn't know how his digital signature (and update infrastructure?) was compromised, how does switching to a new signature help? It could get compromised in the exact same way.
The article linked here brings some more details, but also, the official statement doesn't use the word "compromised". If it did, well it would be a statement with different meaning than the one that was released for us to read.
> Do not download SmartTube from any app store, APK websites or blogs; these were uploaded by other people and may contain malware or ads. SmartTube is not officially published on any app store. Sadly, the Google PlayStore does not allow ad-free Youtube apps using unofficial APIs.
Maybe should actually switch to releasing via F-Droid.
Happy YouTube Premium customer here
Really hate this "something was found" announcements
Which channel distributed the compromised apk? What is the signature of the payload injected? What is the payload, what does it do?
That's exactly why I didn't want to trust this app with a google account, it's mandatory to use it. SmartTube also requires permission to install applications for it's updater feature so it's also possible if the attack was targeted for the malware to install another app to get persistance.
Although it's very unfortunate this happened, and it shows a lack of security practices, this could happen to any all developer. Compromising other apps you do install.
On my TV the app vanished and after some searching, it was disabled. I was kinda afraid Google had finally (ab)used it's Play Services power to ban it. But luckily it was because the developer marked it as compromised. All and all impact was minimised this way.
I doubt your statement about requiring a Google account to be connected, as you can also import subscriptions instead of granting access to your account.
> it's mandatory to use it
I've been using it for years and I've never had to sign in.
What can malware in an apk do?
In an article about not downloading malware: "You can use my downloader! It's totally safe, bro!"
Yeah, I'll pass.
The internal auto updater of the app directly use github as source, was this also compromised ? If malware was only on some random apkmirror upload then it should probably be fine for most users.
Apparently, yes. My guess is it was the Shai-hulud npm malware leaking their Github keys.
I think this comment relates to the fact that article mentions AFTNews Updater app as a way to install SmartTube... not yet released version of software?