Which, unfortunately, is a rather risky situation considering for instance all the rogue ChatGPT-branded extensions and apps people downloaded without a second thought to their legitimacy.

We have been conditioned to view branding as the certificate of legitimacy, and that simply is not true for the Internet where branding can be copied and pasted in seconds.

The risk can be reduced with open source code, verified by the community. Usually when the "branding" gets too authoritarian, people reach for the FOSS version that seems the most trusted.

I doubt they still do it but for whatever reason for a while WhatsApp loads to offer it's APK on its website.

Bet it saw very few installs wonder if we'll go full circle.

Or get signed and trusted apps from a community run alternative "app store" like F-Droid, Arch, or Debian.

Can't do that on iOS.

No one using authoritarian computing platforms will fare well at resisting authoritarians.

Technically you can, but the hoop jumping isn’t ideal.

If only iOS devices had web browsers…