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It’s not practically open source though - how many people actually build it themselves and sideload onto their Android/iphone?

How much effort would it be for the US government to force Google to ship a different APK from everyone else to a single individual?

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I don't know, a lot? They could with the same amount of effort just get Google to ship a backdoored operating system. Or the chipset manufacturer to embed a hardware vulnerability.

"Here's a court order, you must serve this tainted APK we built to the user at this email"

VS

"You must backdoor the operating system used on billions of devices. Nobody can know about it but we somehow made it a law that you must obey."

Come on, that's not the same amount of efforts at all.

Looks like exactly the same amount of effort to me?

Effort maybe but not likelihood of discovery

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