zlacker

>>fsflov+(OP)
I am the first to be on the "I own my phone let me do whatever the heck I want with it" but recently something hit me.

DJI forces you to side load their app for their Air Units and Drones. And this is scary. It looks like the rule they violate for the play store is that their app can self modify.

Let that sink in ... Any tension or whatever political bull crap happens and you have a state controlled malware on your device that can do anything it wants with your drone.

Millions of people installed this without really understanding what could be the consequences...

>>gbin+Va
self-modification doesn't imply much when you can embed v8 in your app, which they take no issue with at all

>>Groxx+Tm
The difference is, in theory if DJI were discovered to be doing something malicious, it could be taken down from the Play Store. If 0% of its current users were side loading the application, that means 100% of their users would be unable to install the app the normal way, and there would be substantial friction to migrate them to sideloading (a google of "install dji app" would probably return a bunch of news articles about whatever the problem was before dji's install instructions).

By making it "normal" to install the app via sideloading, there's little Google could do in the event of malicious app behaviour, and the majority of users would not find out about it (at least, not immediately).