Electrum Bitcoin Wallet from Google Play Store

Question

I recently found out that although the version was exactly the same, the Electrum wallet downloaded from the Play Store is heavier than the app downloaded from the Electrum website.

This raises the question of whether the Google Play Store is fundamentally trustworthy? Even though they are not verifiable right now.

Answer 1

the Electrum wallet downloaded from the Play Store is heavier than the app downloaded from the Electrum website.

Reason for difference in size: https://stackoverflow.com/a/66419404/

So, you may see different size in Google Play Store based on Android device.

Example:

This raises the question of whether the Google Play Store is fundamentally trustworthy?

Best practices:

1. Do not trust Google Play Store
2. Build APK from source: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/master/contrib/android/Readme.md
3. If using APKs from https://electrum.org/#download, verify signatures. APKs are now reproducible since https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/pull/7263/ got merged
4. The binaries are not going to be byte-for-byte identical, as the official release is signed by a keystore that only the project maintainers have. You can use the apkdiff.py python script (written by the Signal developers) to compare the two binaries.

   $ python3 contrib/android/apkdiff.py Electrum_apk_that_you_built.apk Electrum_apk_official_release.apk
   

   This should output APKs match!