A bit skeptical of how this article is written as it seems to be mostly written by AI. Out of curiosity, I downloaded the app and it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article.<p>I've noticed Claude Code is happy to decompile APKs for you but isn't very good at doing reachability analysis or figuring out complex control flows. It will treat completely dead code as important as a commonly invoked function.
The permissions snippet they show also doesn't include location, and you can't request location at runtime at all without declaring it there.<p>I'd verify all this stuff for myself, but Play won't install it in my phone so I can't really get the APK. Maybe because I use Graphene...? but I don't know all the ways they can restrict it, maybe it's something else (though for a pixel 9a it's rather strange if it's hardware based).<p>--- EDIT ---<p>To be specific / add what I can check, this is what my Play Store "about -> permissions" is showing:<p><pre><code> Version 47.0.1 may request access to
Other:
run at startup
Google Play license check
view network connections
prevent phone from sleeping
show notifications
com.google.android.c2dm.permission.RECEIVE
control vibration
have full network access
</code></pre>
which appears fairly normal, and does not include location, and I <i>think</i> Play includes runtime location requests there. Maybe there's a version-rollout happening, or device-type targeting?
> it doesn't request location permissions anywhere, despite the claims in the article<p>The article does not claim the app requests the location. It claims it <i>can</i> do it with a single JS call.
It can request with a JS call. It can't passively collect it without you approving first. The article is written like calling that JS function will turn on location tracking without consent.
> The article does not claim the app requests the location. It claims it can do it with a single JS call.<p>so can ... any other code anywhere on a mobile device? That is how API work...
You need to state the permissions you *may* request/use in AndroidManifest.xml. This data can then be displayed to users pre-installation.<p>From the (limited) article, it doesn't seem they do this: <a href="https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app#permissions" rel="nofollow">https://thereallo.dev/blog/decompiling-the-white-house-app#p...</a><p>----<p>EDIT: I'm mistaken. From the Play Store[0] it has access to<p>* approximate location (network-based)<p>* precise location (GPS and network-based)<p>[0] <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.whitehouse.app&pli=1">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.whitehouse...</a><p>This seems to disagree with:<p>> The location permissions aren't declared in the AndroidManifest but requested at runtime<p>*shrug*, someone should dig deeper. It looks like the article may not match reality.
>as it seems to be mostly written by AI.<p>Is there something in particular that made you conclude that or are you going just with how it felt?<p>For what it's worth, it didn't seem to me.
what version are you on?<p>from the iphone app store: version 47.0.1 - minor bug fixes - 34 minutes ago<p>while the parent posted 18 minutes ago<p>they may have patched the location stuff as part of the “minor bug fixes”?
I have the iOS version from yesterday, haven't updated the app yet.<p>No location permission request prompting encountered. In system settings, where each app requesting location data is listed, it isn't present either.
how do you know it didn't lie during the decompilation?
It doesn't have to lie: unfortunately libraries that are essentially a full application themselves (complete with their own permissions) are not uncommon on mobile.<p>So it could come across a manifest that includes location permissions and some code that would (if enabled) send location, but it might do a bad job properly tracing
Looks like what you might expect in a standard marketing app from a consultancy. They probably hired someone to develop it, that shop used their standard app architecure which includes location tracking code and the other stuff.
The location tracking code is within the OneSignal SDK - which is just a standard messaging platform for sending emails/push messages to users. It doesn't have some magical permissions bypass, the app itself has to request it.
That's exactly what 45Press is. They won a 1.5mil contract to spit out this tripe (tbf the contract includes other wh.gov support).
And r8 which does tree shaking to remove dead code is not smart enough to understand react native so it won't strip it out without extra work from the developer.<p>Cross referencing these different things in the article to other apps that exist was my first thought as these seem pretty generic and probably reused from somewhere else.
The Polish covid quarantine app was famously adapted from some app for store inspectors or something, as it already implemented most of the required functionalities, like asking for photos via push at random times, sending them along with a location etc.<p>They likely did a search-and-replace on the brand name, so you had strings like 'your invoices from Home Quarantine inc' in the code.<p>Not a bad thing per se, getting the app out the door asap was definitely a priority in that project for understandable reasons, but funny nonetheless.
Interesting. The site is nearly unusable to me unfortunately. '19 MBP w/ Chrome - scrolling stutters really bad
Scrolling is extremely poorly behaved on that page for me too, Firefox 149 Windows 10. Which is quite ironic coming from an article that mainly criticizes the web dev aspects of the app!
Scrolling is so laggy it's annoying to follow on mobile (FF 151.0a1)
Does it for me too, chrome on a thinkpad
I agree, the website of the original article is kinda terrible
Not what you meant, but works fine on<p>Firefox
148.0.2 (Build #2016148295), 15542f265e9eb232f80e52c0966300225d0b1cb7
GV: 148.0.2-20260309125808
AS: 148.0.1
OS: Android 14
The argument regarding no certificate pinning seems to miss that just because I might be on a network that MITM's TLS traffic doesn't mean my device trusts the random CA used by the proxy. I'd just get a TLS error, right?
Not if someone can issue the certificate signed by the CA your phone trust.<p>Imagine being in a cafe nearby, say, embassy of the certain north African country known for pervasive and wide espionage actions, which decides to hijack traffic in this cafe.<p>Or imagine living in the country where almost all of the cabinet is literally (officially) being paid by the propaganda/lobbying body of such country.<p>Or living int he country where lawful surveillance can happen without the jury signoff, but at a while of any police officer.<p>Maybe its not common but frequent enough.
> Imagine being in a cafe nearby, say, embassy of the certain north African country known for pervasive and wide espionage actions, which decides to hijack traffic in this cafe.<p>How would they get your phone to trust their CA? Connecting to a Wi-Fi network doesn’t change which CAs a device trusts.
This is stopped by certificate transparency logs. Your software should refuse to accept a certificate which hasn’t been logged in the transparency logs, and if a rogue CA issues a fraudulent certificate, it will be detected.
Israel is not in Africa.
that argument also misses because it is based on old best practices which are no longer relevant.
Not if you are part of an org that uses MDM and pushes their own CA to devices.
This site makes my browser choke.<p>Reader mode was the only thing that made it readable.
Violating the law is what the White House is all about these days.
> That's a personal GitHub Pages site. If the lonelycpp GitHub account gets compromised, whoever controls it can serve arbitrary HTML and JavaScript to every user of this app, executing inside the WebView context.<p>I was promised a meritocracy and non stop winning. When do those begin?
This website is quite GPU intensive when scrolling.
i assumed it was malware out the gate. yep
> <i>An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.</i><p>So at least it does <i>something</i> actually beneficial for the user! I wish it could go even further, the way Reader Mode in a browser would go.
> The official White House Android app has a cookie/paywall bypass injector, tracks your GPS every 4.5 minutes (9.5m when in background), and loads JavaScript from some guy's GitHub Pages (“lonelycpp” is acct, loads iframe viewer page).<p>Doesn’t seem <i>too</i> crazy for a generic react native app but of course coming from the official US government, it’s pretty wide open to supply chain attacks. Oh and no one should be continually giving the government their location. Pretty crazy that the official government is injecting JavaScript into web views to override the cookie banners and consent forms - it is often part of providing legal consent to the website TOS. But legal consent is not their strong suit I guess.
> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.<p>Giving people a taste of web with Ublock Origin annoyance filters applied, refreshing. Can’t believe orange man regime is doing one thing right.
"An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls."<p>In their defense, this is the first thing the Trump admin has done that's unambiguously positive for ordinary people.
Yes, this is a major UX improvement considering I remove those with uBlock Origin anyway.
Indeed.<p>I'd love it somehow taken out of it and made available for the general public. Custom uBlock / Adblock filers will be probably the easiest.
I too love it when US imperialism invades digital spaces, just ignore how the US treats people critical of its own government (not just referring to the Trump admin here) then yeah sure great.<p>Let me know when this can ignore malware/adware from US companies then I'll give accolades.
> An official United States government app is injecting CSS and JavaScript into third-party websites to strip away their cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login gates, and paywalls.<p>Rare Trump administration W. I'm assuming there's one particular website they open in the app that shows a cookie popup, and this was a dev's heavy-handed way of making that go away.
I would've expected worse. :)
lol honestly all of this tracks given the current administration. i'm actually surprised it isn't worse. but yeah, amateur hour for sure.
"Amateur hour" is basically their theme. They were swept in on a wave of distrust for people who know what they're talking about. They were elected to tear down Chesterton's fence, even (and especially) the parts holding in the face-eating leopards.<p>To mix the metaphors further, they (the politicians and their supporters) fancy themselves the kind to dream of things that never were and ask why not. Why not have a war in Iran? You won't know until you give it a try.
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I don't see what the fuss is about. This all looks pretty standard. I use random people's stuff all the time. Isn't that the point of open source?<p>Did you find something malicious in the random GitHub repo? If so, you should write an article about that instead.
Using somebody's stuff is different than hot-linking directly to a hosted version of it, even just from the perspective that dude could delete it at any time and break the whole app.
That's fair. I download and embed, personally. Still, it's not a rant worthy mistake, honestly. Suggest a better approach, sure.
I don't know if you're being serious or not, but in case you are: There is a difference between (re)using other people's open sourced code, hopefully reviewed, and giving anyone in control of the third party repository the ability to run arbitrary code on your user's devices. Even if the "random GitHub repo" doesn't contain any malicious code right now, it may well contain some tomorrow.
It's always a better idea to make a local copy of it.<p>Imagine they're downloading a project directly from your GitHub account. Even if you're not doing anything malicious and have no intention of doing anything malicious even after you've been aware of this, now all of a sudden your GitHub account / email is a huge target for anyone that <i>wants to</i> do something malicious.
All good for you to make those choices for yourself. Your response seems to be show ignorance of all the recent supply chain attacks that have occurred. You can imagine that given the situation with the shoe gifts that many high up members of the administration and cabinet members are running this app.
I'm critical of the author.<p>I'm well aware of supply chain attacks. But this isn't a supply chain attack. If it were, the article would be way more interesting.<p>The supply chain attack articles are interesting exactly because this is so common. So what's special here other than it being loosely related to a disliked political figure? HN isn't supposed to be an especially political website.<p>"A common app is doing the same thing that basically every other app is doing."<p>Is that a good headline? No. And this isn't a good article.
The dependencies weren't vendored, meaning their behavior can change at any time if a malicious actor gains control of that third-party repo.<p>This is bad for security.
you are a fucking genius
Are those references to 45 and 47 "Easter Eggs" to Trump's presidency number(s)? As in, forty-five-press (45th president) and Version 47.x.x (47th president), as well as the text message hotline (45470).
>>> This is a government app loading code from a random person's GitHub Pages.<p>A random person with pronouns, no less. That means the code is “woke.”
Every default setup on every website and app for the last five or so years has been encouraging users to add pronouns, making it difficult to avoid it, even my iPhone asks me to add each person’s pronouns when I add a new contact. I don’t know why Siri needs to know that, but it’s there. There’s one website I use that won’t let you sign up as a contributor without “completing your profile”, which includes mandatory pronouns.<p>I guess there’s some workplaces where it’d be useful for me to update these, probably the ones Apple PMs work in.
I would imagine it would be useful in 100% of English-speaking workplaces because all workplaces have the expectation of English communication, which pronouns are essential for. If I'm writing an email or a chat message, I will typically have to use a pronoun.<p>Inferring pronouns has always been dumb and annoying. Many names don't have obvious pronouns, for example, the name "Taylor". Is that he or she? And clicking the little profile icon and squinting to see if someone is a man or a woman is also a waste of time. It's a lot easier for everyone if it just tells you the pronoun.
It's often useful for me so that I can know how to address you/refer to you, especially if it's a foreign (to me) name I'm unfamiliar with.
I wonder if that person might find it amusing to take down the file the app uses
Is this a surprise to anyone?
nice work, so they can get your location and have ICE scoop you up if required
This is a pretty standard decomplation of an Android app.<p>I am sure if you decompile other apps used by hundreds of thousands of people, you would find all sorts of tracking in there.<p>Thanks for helping the White House improve their app security for free though.
The comments in here are pretty rich. If this was any other app, everyone would be screaming about "why are you being mean to the author", flagging posts left and right.
Nah, I suspect any app that's loading arbitrary JS from somebody's random GitHub page would get called out for that behavior. We're getting supply chain attacks daily.
Are you upset people are being critical of a shabbily run government program?
This was probably payed for, with tax payer money, coming from an official government entity.<p>If any of those 3 is true, the bar should be higher than what someone just did in their free time? I would surely expect more.
That is some impressive willful ignorance. “If it was anybody else threatening to beat this guy up for what he was saying, you’d probably praise them. But a cop does it one time and …”
> Is it what you'd expect from an official government app? Probably not either.<p>Since when is the government a slick and efficiently run outfit that produces secure and well-done software products? Does no one remember the original Obamacare launch?<p>It’s hard to imagine a smug article like this dissecting a product of some other administration. There’s something very weird and off about stuff like this.
You omitted these items immediately above that line:<p>Injects JavaScript into every website you open through its in-app browser to hide cookie consent dialogs, GDPR banners, login walls, signup walls, upsell prompts, and paywalls.<p>Has a full GPS tracking pipeline compiled in that polls every 4.5 minutes in the foreground and 9.5 minutes in the background, syncing lat/lng/accuracy/timestamp to OneSignal's servers.<p>Loads JavaScript from a random person's GitHub Pages site (lonelycpp.github.io) for YouTube embeds. If that account is compromised, arbitrary code runs in the app's WebView.<p>Loads third-party JavaScript from Elfsight (elfsightcdn.com/platform.js) for social media widgets, with no sandboxing.<p>Sends email addresses to Mailchimp, images are served from Uploadcare, and a
Truth Social embed is hardcoded with static CDN URLs. None of this is government infrastructure.<p>Has no certificate pinning. Standard Android trust management.<p>Ships with dev artifacts in production. A localhost URL, a developer IP (10.4.4.109), the Expo dev client, and an exported Compose PreviewActivity.<p>Profiles users extensively through OneSignal - tags, SMS numbers, cross-device aliases, outcome tracking, notification interaction logging, in-app message click tracking, and full user state observation.
You think this administration is trustworthy?
> It’s hard to imagine a smug article like this dissecting a product of some other administration.<p>Yes, that's because this administration is uniquely awful. Basically every single thing this administration does is bad. Often so bad that it's legitimately impressive just how incompetent our leaders our.<p>Obviously previous administrations were not perfect, but to sit here and pretend that they are on the same level is delusion.
Yes, giving a terorist regime billions of dollars of US tax payer money is so much more competent than decapitating it in a few hours. The “Emma’s Two Moms” campaign was a much more competent recruiting strategy. If we have anymore competence, we’ll be broke!