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Might be some google service detecting something’s off or maybe the patch is just outdated.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.eeEnglish
    12·
    7 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.eeEnglish
      7·
      7 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.

  • Rikj000@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    6·
    7 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.mlEnglish
      2·
      7 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)

    • (⬤ᴥ⬤)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneOPEnglish
      1·
      7 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@feddit.ukEnglish
    13·
    7 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.