subim

Fun! This is similar to Simon Tatham's Untangle (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ and the sgt-puzzles package on Debian systems).

> Could it instead be just that Google scans Google Play apps for a string in the binary that matches the Flatbuffers version string format?

Of course that's what's happening: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/include/fl...

That's right. This article doesn't mention it, but the LWN article it cited (https://lwn.net/Articles/542629/) does.