Proposal: Crowdsourced package reliability metrics

[samolego]

Hey everyone,

right now, the universal debloat list relies on manual curation. Some apps might be unsafe to uninstall, but are not yet categorized as such. (Our friends at Universal Android Debloater are doing a hard job of keeping all the info and I am very grateful to them.) What if we could automate this in some way?

I want to propose an anonymous, privacy-first reliability "scoring" system, based on these events rn:

The uninstall signal: when you uninstall a package, Canta would drop "uninstall intent" timestamp to our backend. This establishes our baseline.

The safe signal: if you uninstall a package, restart your phone, and open Canta again, the app realizes your phone successfully booted. It'd drop a quick "boot success" to our backend with a list of packages. If lots of users confirm an app survived a reboot, that app is safe.

The reinstall signal: if users reinstall a package often, it might have broken some functionality. Such packages should be considered "advanced" or similar.

The unsafe signal: we could track the normal drop off rate vs drop off rate per app. If users who uninstalled a certain package reapper much less often than average, it could mean that that package is unsafe to uninstall.

Privacy concerns

Since Canta is a FOSS app dedicated to privacy, I'd like to build such system in strict way with clear & transparent behaviour.

• strict opt-in: The app would get an onboarding screen clearly asking you if you want this feature to be enabled.

• no background tracking: data would only be sent for a split second when you actively uninstall an app or open the application.

• data expiry: we have no interest in building a historical tracking database. Raw logs on the server should be wiped after the timeframe for bootloop survival has passed, leaving behind only the anonymous aggregate scores (e.g., "Package X is 99% safe").

• user / session ids: when opening Canta for the first time, a random uuid would be generated. It would not* be tied to your hardware. Reinstalling Canta would give you a new id.

This is more of an idea draft. I'd like to gather some comunity feedback on this. There's also no ETA currently for this, as I have busy life :).

[kitsumed]

Would be nice if you make that DB available to anyone, so that if Canta dies alternatives can pickup the existing DB.

[samolego]

Hopefully it doesn't die too fast 😅, but yeah, I'll probably use supabase or sth. similar.

[kitsumed]

Btw you may be interested in this as Canta maintainer https://kitsumed.github.io/blog/posts/android-may-soon-restrict-on-device-adb/

[samolego]

Yeah I am aware already. Thank you though!