- Private Internet Access has rolled out its VPN for Android on F-Droid
- It provides de-Googlers with an alternative to sideloading
- It reinforces PIA’s commitment to maintaining its open-source status
Open-source Private Internet Access (PIA) VPN has rolled out its Android app on the digital store F-Droid, a privacy-focused alternative to the Google Play Store.
The move comes to the delight of VPN users who don’t trust Big Tech and its notorious track record of privacy violations, but are also fed up with more old-school, DIY de-Googling alternatives.
From now on, PIA users will be able to safely download the Android VPN app directly from the community-run store dedicated to open-source Android apps. This ensures that the version is free of Google dependencies without users having to manually source and upgrade new versions themselves.
The best VPNs often benefit from independent third parties to prove their reliability, including through commissioning security reports or independent audits.
With PIA now available via F-Droid, PIA users can now rely on a community of privacy-conscious individuals instead of having to blindly trust a binary file provided by the VPN directly. “We pride ourselves on being a VPN where anyone can read the code we actually ship — landing on F-Droid is a natural extension of that commitment,” said the company.
What is F-Droid?
To install a VPN, Google Play Store is usually the common way. However, some users steer clear of the tech giant, which has faced countless legal cases relating to privacy and is known for collecting vast amounts of user data, including for targeted advertising.
A breath of fresh air, F-Droid’s catalog of free and open-source Android apps is run by a group of volunteers that builds every app from the public source code rather than from a file provided by the developer, and makes it available on its Google-alternative store.
Because all apps on F-Droid are open-source and compiled independently, users can be sure that the binaries are tamper-free builds of the listed source code.
What’s more, F-Droid volunteers carry out these checks on users’ behalf by auditing the open-source code, inspecting the code to check that it contains no spying or any sort of malicious behaviour — so you don’t have to do it yourself.
Why a native PIA’s F-Droid app matters
The digital store offers a far more reliable alternative to the more traditional method of sideloading your VPNs. This involves changing the device’s security settings to allow the installation of apps from sources outside the Google Play ecosystem, including the VPN’s website or alternative sites.
However, compiled binary code is opaque and has to come from somewhere, often the developer themselves. And by relying on the developer you are implicitly trusting their word — something that is easily abused.
Furthermore, with sideloading, you won’t receive the automatic notifications and pop-up messages from the official app stores that you would get via Google Play, which means you’ll need to monitor and install the APK manually to keep the app up to date — something that F-Droid takes care of.
To download the F-Droid app, you can visit f-droid.org in your browser and download and install the F-Droid APK; then install PIA once you’ve found it in the list of downloaded apps.
Ultimately, you are always relying on a third party unless you install the software yourself. But between a profit-driven company and a group of volunteers with a privacy policy that guarantees no shared accounts, no installation tracking and no adverts, we are sure the choice for many will remain a no-brainer.
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