“At least 10,000 Signal users can be attributed to a 12-year-old kid in India who created a somewhat popular clone of the encrypted chat app,” reports Motherboard:
Dev Sharma, a Signal user from Melbourne, Australia, found the Signal clone when he encountered an unusual thing: Signal displayed a pop-up showing that their friend had just joined the app. Sharma messaged their friend, but the friend had never even heard of Signal, despite apparently using the app. The friend had downloaded a different app called “Calls Chat,” according to a tweet from Dev. It turned out, Calls Chat is actually a clone of Signal and lets users communicate with people on the legitimate Signal app.
The app may have been harmless in this instance, but its existence and thousands of downloads shows how it can be relatively easy for someone to take the open source code of Signal and repurpose it for their own means, potentially misleading users about what they’re actually downloading in the process. “I didn’t know I was creating a clone of Signal, in fact I didn’t even know such an app existed,” Dheeraj, the boy who made the clone, told Motherboard in a phone call…
The Google Play Store bars developers from impersonating other apps or making others that are deceptive, however. Google told Motherboard on Wednesday that the chat app is no longer available on the Play Store.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot