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PSA: Nova Launcher has been owned by analytics company Branch since 2022
(www.androidpolice.com)
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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2024
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Privacy Guides
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I greatly appreciate this
I had no fucking clue for two years. How much longer would I have remained ignorant? Frightening.
Well, the weird thing is they haven't actually done anything to the app yet. Looks like they're just focusing on the next major release. The version that has been available in the store for the last 2 years hasn't been fucked with.
I just hopped to another launcher by total coincidence a couple of weeks ago. This is welcome news
If you are concerned about analytics and tracking then I have bad news for you. Most apps on the Play Store are absolutely loaded with inbuilt trackers. You can check them using Exodus (or use the Aurora Store since privacy reports are displayed by default there).
Thank you for that site. Very useful.
I haven't seen that feature on the aurora store, but I probably just missed it.
I expect free apps to have tracking, but if it's something like an app launcher that needs so many permissions and is running all the time... That's just horrific
It's towards the bottom of the page for whatever app you're viewing. Sometimes it won't have a privacy report available by default, but you can always go through to the website and generate one yourself. One of the worst apps I've found so far is the Woolworths one (Australian supermarket). It contains 11 trackers and within the first 6 hours following installation my tracker blocker had already prevented 11,325 tracking attempts.
As someone who likewise freaked out when I got a pihole setup and 30% or more of requests were blocked, the early days are normally just the same requests endlessly retrying. So while it blocked 11k, if they weren't blocked it would probably only be a few hundred. Probably poor programming not covering the fact it can be blocked.
Still better to block, though.
In a way I think that makes it more scary though, at least in a figurative sense. It's like a group of debt collectors constantly banging on your door to get in and you have your foot there and are telling them to go away but they won't listen. If you take it away for a second, they knock it down and come charging in to take what they believe they are owed.
Yeah, that's pretty much it 😐
I mean if you install apps from commercial stores then this is the norm. If its not explicitly proven to be tracking and analytics free, then its usually not.