Providing debugging versions of apps alongside

,
1

Long shot, but, feature request:

FDroid should provide apk versions with “debuggable” flag set to true, alongside the normal variants.

Motive: I need to access private data of an application which doesn’t export it otherwise. Apparently, on a non-rooted installation, the only way to do this is to use adb’s run-as <app id> command which does not work if the app is not marked debuggable. To install a debuggable version of the app as an update, one would need to have it signed by the same key as the one for the installed version of the app.

Pros:

  • enables the use-case I described above

Cons:

  • more load on the build servers for a probably niche use-case
2

…and the same application ID, you might have the surprise that the “debug” version ends up as appid.debug instead, most of the time, not to mention…it might have some sort of crash log uploaded somewhere and etc.

Basically you’d need some sort of new flavour that’s just like fdroid used ones but with debug. Not sure it’s worth pursuing. Better ask upstream to add that feature in the non-debug version.

3

Ah, interesting. I wasn’t aware of the fact that it changes the application ID.

4

It depends on the app, the devs, but they usually do.