Eon, you created this account 3 hours ago, with the obvious purpose to raise this topic again.
To me, it sounds a lot more than “users want to have some guarantees” in a friendly discussion.
I’m aware that there is a small group of haters who are monitoring any of our message, official communication, with the sole purpose to hurt the /e/ project. I won’t play this game.
So, for now, our official answer about your questions is in the FAQ.
Therefore, if you find that we redistribute some modified or suspect APK through our installer. In this case, please tell us, and will figure out about the issue and find solutions and then you can put the shame on us.
Otherwise, you trust the system, and if you don’t trust, please use something else. There are plenty of alternatives, including F-Droid, Apkpure etc.
Obviously, the google play store will never be open source, and most of its applications
are proprietary software. So, the access to general purpose applications will remain something that cannot be a direct access to the source.
Some users have reported that they are using Aurora, which is doing a kind of proxy between the user and the play store. However, we won’t recommend this and will never integrate it into /e/ because it’s infriging the play store terms of services.
For this, we have to use indirect mechanisms, that don’t infrige the play store TOS, and therefore, we are using a service that is not officially part of the /e/ project, and which is called cleanapk.org
On the long run, we other plans with partners, to offer something more transparent, but it’s too soon to talk about this.
. Why should I trust you when I can read your source, have it audited, and make my own opinion about your project? You’re basically asking us to follow you blindly or get away? This is insane, and, in my opinion, not the way /e/ will make a difference.