The Perils of App Stores and App Markets

App stores and „markets“ for software are very popular these days. Most of the buyers and downloaders believe that the software in these stores is readily available and can be used at will. You just open the store application, browse the content and click/touch/smear to get your software. This is the theory. In practice the software offered can be very volatile and disappear without warning. Just take the VLC player or RedPhone/TextSecure as example.

The aquisition of Whispersystems by Twitter is the most recent case. Twitter acquired Whispersystems, the vendor of hardened Android software and secure communication tools. Immediately after the deal their apps were unavailable in the Android market. They even shut down the RedPhone servers, thus denying users around the globe secure end-to-end communication. TextSecure, a tool to use OTR-style encryption for text messages, continues to work, but unless you have backups you cannot install it any more. Why Twitter bought Whispersystems and why they took their software offline remains a mystery. The time of these events couldn't be worse. Whispersystems published the tools to help people communicate during the Arab Spring. Now they deny the same users the use of these tools during Egypt's election.

So beware of App Stores and Markets. Unless you get the source code, you don't own anything. Expect any software without disclosed source code to vanish at any given moment.

• The GPL, the App Store, and you
• The GPL and the iOS App Store
• Steer clear of Android Market and its DRM