F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.
  • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
    11·
    1 year ago

    My favorite F-droid app: !boinc@sopuli.xyz

    • Open Source
    • Uses your phone’s spare computational power to help scientists working on everything from cancer research to finding pulsars and black holes. You choose which projects to contribute to. Phones are more compute-per-watt efficient than most computers, and every little bit helps!
    • Can’t be published in Google Play store due to their ToS (it downloads and executes code from outside of its own APK which is not allowed)
    • Make sure to limit CPU usage to keep temps down. If your phone can’t get rid of heat easily, this app is not for you.
    • Albbi@lemmy.ca
      23·
      1 year ago

      Seems like awful use of your phone battery. Things like this are much better suited to desktop computers than anything that runs off battery. Even if they are more efficient as you say, they wear out much faster, leading to e-waste.

      • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
        3·
        1 year ago

        By default it only runs when battery is full and plugged into a charger. If you are keeping temps low there is no battery damage. I have ran this for years on several different phones.

    • naut@infosec.pubOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      can’t trust it (blindly) for some reason… but there are other reasons I will not get into here

      • makeasnek@lemmy.ml
        61·
        1 year ago
        • BOINC has been around for decades and no project containing malware has ever happened. Ultimately you have to trust the BOINC project you are running code from. Most of them are run out of major universities or research institutes.
        • BOINC also features code-signing to prevent mitm attacks or somebody breaking into a project server and distributing malware that way. Projects are encouraged to keep the signing keys on an offline machine or at least a different machine, which probably generally is what happens. Most developers do their coding work on one machine and then publish that to a server. Using your server for development would be inconvenient and questionable practice.
        • With Android specifically, I don’t know the extent to which malware could even do anything as there’s built-in sandboxing.
        • BOINC does also have a sandboxed mode available on Windows, but it will prevent BOINC from using your GPU if you want it to do that. On Linux, BOINC typically runs as an unprivileged user.