Mapbox Telemetry

[IzzySoft]

First congrats to getting rid of the non-free components (GMS & Google Maps)!

Just wondering if, when integrating MapBox, Telemetry was accidentally enabled – or if that was intended? If that could be disabled, your app would finally be "Anti-Feature-free", and maybe even acceptable by F-Droid if you wanted to apply (currently your app is in my repo – and in case you want to link to that from your Readme, I'd even have a badge for that 😉).

[jojo243]

@IzzySoft

First congrats to getting rid of the non-free components (GMS & Google Maps)!

Thanks very much! That was (part of) what we were aiming for with the last upgrade.
Of course we want make sure Telemetry is not enabled... If it is the case right now, that is by accident. We're looking into this.

[IzzySoft]

Of course we want make sure Telemetry is not enabled...

Oh… I didn't check if it was enabled. My library scanner only detected the corresponding lib. AFAIK Mapbox can be configured to not even include it – and what's not there can cause neither problems nor suspicion 😄

[jojo243]

and what's not there can cause neither problems nor suspicion 😄

True 😃

AFAIK Mapbox can be configured to not even include it

After a quick search, it seems Telemetry in Mapbox can be disabled programmatically, which would at least allow us to disable it by default (instead of the usual opt-out via UI). Unfortunately, I haven't found any resources pointing at how to not even include the telemetry library yet. I would of course prefer it that way, contributing to the unsuspiciousness of the app 😉 Maybe the proguard-rules is something worth digging into in this regard...

My library scanner only detected the corresponding lib

Is this scanner available somewhere? It would be great if there was a way for us to use this scanner to see if our efforts are working.

[IzzySoft]

Speaking of Proguard: that might work, in combination with "disabling it programmatically" and using minification. Not being used, minification should remove it then. Would be worth a try for sure.

Is this scanner available somewhere?

Indeed it is. Instead of pointing you to its repo directly, let me point you to my article describing it. That way you know which files you'll need at all (hint: just my library definitions and one PHP script, which should be easy to adapt to the programming language of your choice – if you do the latter, merge requests are welcome 😄) plus how to use them. One external tool you will need: Apktool, to get the baksmali out of the APK. All described in the article of course.

Until you have it up-and-ready, if you want a quick check just give me a link to the APK and I run the check for you. For later it's of course a good idea to have it handy yourself, so whenever you add other external resources you can look what else they "dragged in".

Thanks for caring! And for adding the badge 😃