Dear kind Blokada development people,
first of all thank you for providing us with this potent defence tool for our valued privacy. Now, we will recommend this tool to all that use an Android smartphone as a baseline privacy defence.
We monitor traffic caused by the install and usage of apps. Literally every app apart from yours (as of now) creates some sort of connection to google (e.g. clientservices.google.com) even if installed by manually installing an apk of a given app. Thankfully, Blokada is a potent antidote and we can block connections with it.
Here is my question:
How did you manage to compile your blokada app without such a connection? Did you have to actively switch off default options in the sdk or do the app authors have to actively engage such connection mechanisms?
This, at least in part, answers the question if app authors are only mistaken in using default settings or whether there is likely to be intention on their side to deliver to google or facebook or what have you.
The idea is to provide genuine privacy-aware app authors with guides as to how to implement an app in a privacy-friendly and data lean way.
Hello Stefan and welcome to the forum:)
Thank you for your kind words and interest in our work!
I am sure that @Karol will be able to answer your questions:)
Hello Karol,
first of all thank you for the reply! I was thinking that Blokada and other apps commendable for privacy protection were actively de-selecting options or uncommenting default options suggested by the frameworks and the sdks. So maybe you could shed some light into this issue by firstly revealing which sdk you use for blokada and secondly, which default options with regards to privacy you actively change for the compilation of blokada. Looking for your insights,
Google Play Services SDK is something you need to explicitly include in your build configuration. Or use libraries dependent on it, like Firebase, which is very popular. Blokada simply does not include any of those. You can see our source code on our Github.