this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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As a maintainer of another unofficial flatpak:
You can always check the source code of the flatpak (code that downloads the dev then runs it inside the flatpak sandbox) here: https://github.com/flathub/org.signal.Signal
Any of the current maintainers could add malicious code, but that would ruin their GitHub & by proxy:Twitter,LinkedIn credibility.
Flathub have final say on what is built and hosted on their flatpak repository (Flathub != Flatpak) and are able to remove versions at will.
Personally I don’t understand the large warnings on flatpaks built by others, by that logic you should get a warning sign each time you download from the Ubuntu community apt repository.
OSS is built out of love, and to me this warns guilty before proven innocent.
Well I think you have to distinguish between a messenger and other programms, because a messenger has a lot of sensitive data.
Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn't trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there's a really positive community around its design.
Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.
What warnings?
The 'appstore' of some distributions, e.g. Linux Mint, displays a warning or hint for unofficial flatpaks. In Mint the display of unofficial flatpaks are toggled off by default and there is a warning or recommendation displayed against toggling on.
I'm not a developer so I can't really check myself
I just read through the unofficial Flathub Flatpak for Signal and it is very simple. It fetches the .deb from Signal's website, installs it in the sandbox, and uses a launcher script to tell the OS some basic toggles like should it start minimized or should it display a tray icon. In the script it makes use of zypak, which to my understanding is to tell electron (chromium) to allow sandboxing to be handled by Flatpak. Here is the repo and the build instructions is the .yaml file.
Flatpaks are pretty easy to read through. Just go to the links section of Flathub and click the manifest, then read it to see what is done during building.