With how strict F-Droid is I would have expected them to build from source all the way down. Though that sounds like a daunting task so I don't blame them.
Machine code. Assembly is higher level. since data and instructions can be mixed machine code is harder to decode - that might be a byte of data or an instruction. Mel would have [ab]used this fact to make his programs work. It is worse on x86 where instructions are not fixed length but even on arm you can run into problems at times
The binaries are open source, but Google doesn't design their build chain to recompile from scratch every time.
Also, you don't need to compile all of AOSP just to get the toolchain binaries.
With how strict F-Droid is I would have expected them to build from source all the way down. Though that sounds like a daunting task so I don't blame them.
Everything is open source, if you can read assembly ;)
Machine code. Assembly is higher level. since data and instructions can be mixed machine code is harder to decode - that might be a byte of data or an instruction. Mel would have [ab]used this fact to make his programs work. It is worse on x86 where instructions are not fixed length but even on arm you can run into problems at times
You can always lift machine code to assembly. Its a 1 to 1 process.
2 replies →
... this is why we get DRM. Source modification is what hurts them.