I’ve seen multiple people here talk about lucky patcher and wanted to try it out, found the official site though reddit (cos I’ve had google give me badware links for things like these before) and the site rang every alarm bell in my brain.
From the too-good-to-be-true premise to the red text before the download saying that the app is Perfectly Safe, scanned the apk with virustotal (not perfectly accurate i know) and it returned a bunch of flags.

So is luckypatchers.com the actual site?

Edit: got the apk from the direct download link in the subreddit’s about page and ran it on waydroid, seemed legit but also very old and the custom patches would just make the app (YouTube in this case) close instantly.
Might be some google service detecting something’s off or maybe the patch is just outdated.

  • Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    ·
    9 months ago

    Yes that is the actual site.

    LuckyPatcher has been around forever,
    and has a good reputation + community.

    Never seen anyone mention anything that it might contain malicious code.

    The developer receives revenue through donations and showing ads on the site.

    Sadly the project is not open source though.
    My guess would be to prevent the hacks / patches it uses,
    from being patched / made un-usable.

    To be 100% sure though,
    you’d have to de-compile the app,
    and reverse engineer the source code,
    which is a very tedious and time consuming task.

    • leanleft@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      9 months ago

      i used luckypatcher a long time ago. it was cool how i could remove ads from certain apps.(leaves big ugly red X)

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    9 months ago

    You’d want to see the source code, to verify it does only what it claims.

    That said, I used it maybe 10 years ago, on a firewalled/monitored device, and it didn’t make any outbound connections back then, ever.

    • catloaf@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      9 months ago

      And also compile it from that source code yourself, because it’s difficult to validate that the APK you download didn’t have malware added by the person compiling it.

    • (⬤ᴥ⬤)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      i periodically check how far revanced has come but right now im fine with using the YouTube site on firefox, with ad and sponsorblock of course

    • (⬤ᴥ⬤)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      9 months ago

      root unlocks some features but is not required.

      i didn’t get much success because the apps i tried it with were all newer versions and the patches were 3 years old at minimum but it might work better with like removing ads on a unity game or things like that

      the app also has a pretty odd and old-school ui (read: ugly as sin) but i got the hang of patching and installing without a guide, no doubt there are some on the site though

  • theshatterstone54
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    6
    ·
    edit-2
    9 months ago

    Lucky Patcher is interesting but much like rooting my phone, I found it disappointing in that it didn’t bring much that I really wanted to do on a phone.

    If you want to hack games, just use cracked stores like happymod.

    Edit: With HappyMod you are risking the potential for malware as some people have mentioned. Do your research before trusting an internet stranger.

      • theshatterstone54
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 months ago

        Good point. I should have mentioned that. Sorry. I used to use ACMarket but I can’t recommend it because of how ad-driven it was (and I can’t speak about safety cuz I have no idea).

          • theshatterstone54
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            9 months ago

            No, I don’t. I remember using Aptoide to try to get Minecraft for free until they released 1.12 (Better Together) Bringing Mobile Minecraft up to Feature Parity with Bedrock on all platforms. The following versions, including minor updates didn’t work because it required a license verification which ACMarket had removed in their modded version of Minecraft. That’s around when I started using it, and I haven’t used it for about 4-7 years approximately.