Has Play Protect removed KDE Connect from your phone? Let us know
old.reddit.comThis is an interesting exhibit as KDE Connect is an example of a powerful app. Powerful apps that do non-trivial things are needed to extract the potential of these wonderful devices. But they sail too close to the wind for the gatekeepers that rather keep them dumb devices locked and "safe".
Over time this is going to stiffle innovation big time.
Still seems to be present on my phone.
I love that little app. It's so dang useful to be able to wirelessly copy files from my pc to my phone and vice versa. I previously tried a sftp client on android (terminus?) to no avail.
Edit: I installed via the play store, I see many folks have installed it via fdroid but I'm not sure why.
I found file transfer with KDEConnect unreliable and often ended up with corrupted copies. Now I use Syncthing instead and just permanently share a directory; when I want to share a file I just drop it in there and a few seconds later it is on all the other devices even if they are not in the same network segment.
> Edit: I installed via the play store, I see many folks have installed it via fdroid but I'm not sure why.
Because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429193 (KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS).
Little known feature of tailscale, it let's you send files to all your devices. Has to be explicitly enabled on certain platforms and you'd never know it existed without reading the docs.
It's called Taildrop. https://tailscale.com/kb/1106/taildrop/
Still can't create a temporary ad hoc wireless network to transfer files directly between devices. If they did that it would be on par with airdrop
I use the HTTP server built into Mixplorer (the best file manager I've ever used). It can be added as a Quick Settings toggle.
Must be a bug there are other people on reddit reporting other apps get deleted as well. Even ones from Samsung.
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/176bk9b/goog...
>It is affecting the f-droid users
Wow, I didn't know play 'protect' could do that.
Google has root on your Android phone, they can technically do anything they want. The only practical thing stopping them is their own scruples, for whatever that may be worth, or bad press.
Same is true for Apple.
(With one marrow exclusion for those who installed a "de-googled" Android variant and run no Google services.)
> "de-googled" Android variant and run no Google services
The only way to fly!
Or GrapheneOS with Sandboxed Play Services running as regular user apps.
They can still do a lot. I'd much rather use software I can inspect to talk to the services I really need (firebase push) and replace the ones I can (like location). MicroG is great for that <3
It can even fake some of the more basic safetynet attestation crap and during Covid they made their own version of the Bluetooth thing. Marvin the dev is a great guy.
I don't know why people hate on MicroG so much. Grapheneos devs foam at the mouth when you mention it and in the lineageos irc channel you get Insta kicked when you mention it.
No one should use graphene.
Why?
Because it requires placing trust in someone who does not exhibit enough stability or rationality to justify that trust.
I really like grapheneOS features and it clearly increased my battery life but... . After looking at the community, some of the developers, seem fragile and unstable. It is the only negative I have for grapheneOS but it stands out enough to make me reconsider using it.
I personally recommend CalyxOS. It's a well-known alternative which uses microG.
Malware tends to come from third party stores. An anti-malware system that only looked at apps installed from Play would be considerably less useful. False positives that trigger automatic quarantine are very bad. That's the root thing here.
If you can stomach the compromises this is the way: https://lineage.microg.org/
It's a never ending battle to access Play store apps with Google regularly breaking Aurora Store Nightly, but some of us manage.
Yeah Aurora is heavily throttled right now ('this account is rate limited'). Still, I use it because I don't want a Google account on my phone.
The good thing about MicroG is that you can replace some Google stuff with better ones like a local location DB. It's also much lighter because it doesn't spend 90% of its processing time trying to spy on you. Its code is actually written to do stuff on your behalf as the user, not Google's.
Sandboxing real Google Play does stop it from being able to do some of the spying but not all, and it doesn't stop it from trying and wasting battery power.
The only thing I really need from Google is the push messaging because most app services simply don't integrate with anything else :(
I still have it but plan on going postal if Google removes it. Just turned off Play Protect just in case. Abuse your power, lose your power.
How do you turn it off ?
Play Store, tap your profile picture at top-right, Play Protect is on the menu.
Google will sometimes prompt to re-enable it when installing/updating apps from outside Play Store, I don't know if that can be stopped.
I turned off play protect when it marked an app as malware probably because it violated their play store guidelines and not because it was malicious.
There is no way to permanently tell it that an app is not in fact malicous and it will keep asking you to remove it.
KDE Connect plus Wireguard is my favorite combo.
KDE Connect commands can also be triggered from Tasker, so with Autowear I can trigger commands from my watch
Wow, Protect just uninstalled KDE connect :/
Still present here, v1.29 - appreciate the warning...
I installed with the usual Play store, link seems to show mostly (all?) affected were f-droid users
It's still on the play store... last update was on September 20.