Court orders Google to uninstall pirate IPTV app sideloaded on Android devices

Hopefully there's an appeal on this and this judge gets reprimanded for his decision. Functionally this is the equivalent of an apartment manager or condo manager being ordered to go into someone's house, search specifically for contraband and then remove that contraband. Just because they have emergency access and repair access does not make them a law enforcement agency nor does that mean that courts can order a private companies to perform searches and seizures outside of a law enforcement getting assistance to execute a search warrant.

The supreme Court is already ruled that 4th amendment protections do extend to cell phones. This order clearly runs contrary to that.

Brazil had a similar thing a few weeks ago, but it got drowned in the news because if was related to the Twitter/X block.

While the block itself may be legitimate, as the motivation was the refusal from X from deleting a few tweets doxxing a police investigator and his family members, the whole process was done in a few little short of a full blown dictatorship: one of the points of the court order demanded Google and Apple to remove all VPN apps from their stores, and some legal experts interpreted that as also ordering removal from the phones themselves. The justice that sent the order backtracked it later, but it was possible and the order was standing during that time.

The VPN issue got relatively little discussion on the press and too many people were too quick to equate criticism of the overly broad court order with defense of Twitter and Musk, so the well was poisoned from the start.

I use a less risky/shady version of the MagisTV app with Stremio [1] and the Torrentio extension [2]. Stremio is available legally on the Play Store, and I installed it on my Chromecast with Google TV/Android phone/Windows PC, it's awesome. The shady part is installing the Torrentio extension.

This setup allows you to stream pirated movies and series with a clean UI. You can search for movies in a IMDB-like database, save them to watch later using the library feature, add subtitles, select streaming quality, and the extension syncs with your Stremio account, so you only need to install it once and it works across all your devices. I suspect this might get shut down soon due to legal pressure. MagisTV offers live TV, sports, and more, so the pressure from corporations is even greater.

Of course, if your ISP monitors you for pirated content, you could get into trouble if you don't use a VPN. However, in my country, it's not a big deal since a lot of people use torrents. Piracy is likely more common in South America compared to the US or Europe.

[1] https://www.stremio.com/downloads

[2] https://torrentio.strem.fun/configure

“What will be achieved once this is completed is that the installed app disappears and cannot be downloaded again, thus breaking the cycle of digital piracy. The only way [Magis TV] could circumvent this is to develop a new app where we would be waiting for them, ready to do exactly the same thing once we identify it.”

... Or they add another step to the distribution or sideloading process that mutates the apk with a little bit of random data so that it won't have the same hash and thus won't be identified for deletion.

Then I would consider Google's apps to be malware.

Is google able to un-install any sideloaded application for any android version?

For example, android 7, 8,9, 10 etc? Or was there a specific update that made this possible?

Frankly this is quite worrysome as we already know google enabled COVID "controls" without any opt in or notice, and I believe this affected all versions of android.

Does Google have the technical ability to do this?

I'm not sure the android platform API's actually let google play services do it, and even if they did, I'm not sure google play services has code to uninstall an app not from the play store on request.

So next step is to publish custom builds with a random value added somewhere, so every download the of apk is unique. Good luck finding all the possible sha-sums.

All the more reason to keep GApps completely off one's devices. Even if Google doesn't overreach, governments can and (per TFA) do.