Dashlane, a subscription-based password manager, has made the source code for its Android and iOS apps available on GitHub in order to encourage more collaborative and open development in the future.
“Transparency and trust are part of our company values, and we strive to reflect those values in everything we do. We hope that being transparent about our code base will increase the trust customers have in our product,” Dashlane announced.
“We also believe in a more open digital world in which developers can easily participate and connect with each other. This is our contribution to this ambition and another step in that direction,” adds the announcement.
It will be distributed via GitHub under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. And, according to the company, updates to these projects, which include Android and iOS apps, will be done quarterly and will become more frequent as internal capability and processes improve.
By making the code for its mobile app available for exploration and auditing, the company hopes to receive community feedback on how to improve it as well as increased security vulnerability reports from cybersecurity researchers. The company also stated that it hopes the “opening up” will incentivize engineers to “level up” code quality and make it more accessible to the general public.
It is important to note that Dashlane did not become an open-source project overnight, and its macOS and Windows apps remain closed source; additionally, it is not currently accepting direct contributions from the developer community.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.