Everyone will agree that Kodi is the greatest open source media player in the world.
But can we say the same about Kodi builds?
Kodi builds, as they are called, usually get a bad rap.
Why?
Because different Kodi communities keep on banning them.
And this is an issue that rises up again and again whenever one talks about Kodi.
What is it about Kodi builds that is so bad?
In this piece, we’ll take a look that some of the reasons why many communities have started to ban the distribution of different Kodi builds.
For now, we would just like to say that we hope we are able to convince a few bunches of readers to actually migrate from using Kodi builds to something safer as far as the process of installing Kodi and then setting up Kodi is concerned.
In short, readers should know that if they want to make sure that they get the best performance in terms of media content and streaming out of Kodi, then they will have to stick to safe and official procedures.
Or even un-official procedures provided they have a good reputation in the community.
There aren’t many unofficial Kodi communities that users can really count on though.
Among the few handfuls, there is TV ADDONS.
If you want to know anything about Kodi, you first come to TV ADDONS (and Security Gladiators, of course) and then you go to the place your friend told you about.
But the thing we want to drive home here is that if Kodi users are unable to find something about Kodi at sites like this and TV ADDONS then there is a high chance that “thing” about Kodi is something that they should stay away from.
Before we begin the process of explaining why users should stay away from Kodi builds we would like to make it clear that not all Kodi builds are bad.
Some of them do come with nice features.
But those features are only useful if we all live in a neat, tidy and perfect world.
A world where one could trust any and every anonymous entity in the online world.
That isn’t the case now.
Perhaps never will be.
So readers need to take advantage of the fact that Kodi gives users a lot of freedom in terms of choice.
It is open source so, there will always be something happening in and around Kodi.
Kodi users, as well as developers, are pretty much free as far as what they want to do with an open source platform.
They can customize their Kodi setup as much as they want.
However, here at Security Gladiators, we feel that we need to inform Kodi users about several reasons why they would want to stay away from all of these Kodi builds from anonymous sources.
Table of Contents
Add-ons which are not trustworthy.
This point if pretty obvious.
Kodi community and Kodi add-ons have proven it time and time again that the majority of Kodi developers only care about themselves and their own interests.
They don’t give much thought to the actual Kodi user.
All that is on their mind is money and popularity.
The end user is usually on his/her own when it comes to data protection and privacy.
On the face of it, there is nothing inherently wrong with building Kodi add-ons into any given Kodi build for improved functionality.
But, these add-ons can lead the user to end up compromising his/her own Kodi system at some random point in the near future.
The problem with a hijacked Kodi system is that the consequences aren’t always apparent.
Hackers can leverage hijacked Kodi systems to cause the end user a lot of problems such as loss of personal and sensitive information.
Moreover, hackers now have the ability to use the compromised Kodi user’s device to launch DDoS attacks, hack other people and spam them.
The thing readers need to understand here is that as far as access to system and system resources is concerned, Kodi and Kodi add-ons are the same.
Hackers know that.
That’s why they are so eager to use Kodi add-ons to target people and turn them into victims rather than Kodi users who enjoy their streaming experience.
As alluded to before, hackers can easily hijack some of these Kodi builds and then use the user’s Kodi system to perform several types of malicious tasks such as sending spam to the community and stealing the other users’ credit card information all without the knowledge of the user who the hacker has hacked in the first place.
One other thing Kodi users need to keep in mind is that, the more the number of Kodi add-ons that they install, the more they increase their likelihood of installing a Kodi add-on that is malicious and nasty.
Each given Kodi add-ons poses its own threat to user security.
Users should think about why they would want to take such a risk when they are installing any and every Kodi build that is out there with any number of these unsafe Kodi add-ons.
Besides, the majority of Kodi users will probably never come across to use all those Kodi add-ons that these Kodi builds love to advertise so much.
Performance loss
Since Kodi is a media streaming platform, the performance of a given setup matters a lot.
If a Kodi is not performing at its peak efficiency, then users will not have any fun in watching TV series, movies, and documentaries.
Now, we’ll be the first ones to recognize the fact that there are many factors at play that can lead Kodi users to have a degraded and inefficient Kodi performance.
Some of these reasons include an increased number of Kodi add-ons.
Yes.
Installing a bit too many Kodi add-ons can lead to security problems.
Include activities such as making a ton of customizations via graphical modifications to the official Kodi interface as well.
You see, there is a very special reason why each and every good Kodi developer tries to use nothing but the default (and rather functional) Confluence skin.
The reason is that the default skin has a much higher performance level than any other available skin options.
Privacy issues via techniques such as Phone Home
What is Phone Home?
Why have we even brought it up here?
Well, as it turns out, there are some unscrupulous Kodi builds that don’t shy away from integrating a certain feature in their builds which has the ability to communicate without the user’s knowledge in the background.
This feature is known as the Phone Home feature.
But who does the Phone Home feature communicate with?
It communicates with the Kodi build’s original creator and/or creator’s server.
This can bring forward a ton of Kodi user privacy issues.
In fact, our research shows that such problems can even lead people to get into some serious legal trouble (relatively speaking) such as fines for privacy.
Some of these Kodi builds now even require the Kodi user to go through a registration process in order to use them.
Then there are other Kodi builds that have made a bit of a reputation when it comes to disguising their real code in order to make it very difficult for anyone to make the determination of that the code is actually up to.
Bad code that comes with bad modified Kodi addon
We are not going to deny the fact that some Kodi addon developers have a good heart.
They have a good heart in the sense that they continually release Kodi addon updates so that they are able to provide the user with the highest levels of performance.
Along with that, they also try hard to provide the best functionality for Kodi users.
The problem with the majority of the creators of, what the community calls, Kodi builds is that, generally speaking, they have little to no idea about what programming is.
And isn’t.
That results in these creators making modifications to the official Kodi add-on code which has the potential of breaking existing Kodi addons without any necessity.
Kodi addons which are actually paid IPTV offerings
Just like before, we have a fairly good reason to discourage too much use of premium (that means paid) IPTV Kodi streaming services.
From a historical perspective, most of these IPTV services have actually facilitated several types of fraud.
That is not just bad for the developers of these IPTV services but it also brings a bad name to the Kodi community.
Not to mention, because of these fraudulent Kodi IPTV addons, the Kodi community also has to face some major legal heat.
From a legal standpoint, there are very few (if any) things which are worse than people who charge for IP (intellectual property) that they do not own.
Repositories and their missing parts
Some people don’t give enough attention to the way they install their Kodi add-ons.
What do we mean by that?
We mean, Kodi users utilizing the wrong repositories to install the right Kodi add-ons.
Sometimes, Kodi users get a bit too adventurous and install Kodi add-ons without the use of a Kodi repository.
The problem with installing add-ons in such a way is that, when the time comes for updates, these won’t go through the update process correctly.
That, in turn, would mean that the user will have to deal with messy and/or broken Kodi add-ons.
And that’s not even the worst part.
The worst part is when the user ends up a broken add-on AND has given the developers of that add-on (probably untrustworthy people) authority to hijack the Kodi device.
After hijacking the device, these not-to-be-trusted developers try to damage Kodi add-ons that come from other upright developers.
Such developers don’t find it morally hard to push nasty and malicious Kodi updates.
Issues with technical support
When Kodi users opt to install any one of these Kodi builds, they are actually making it a lot difficult (and of course, irritating) for various Kodi add-ons developers to actually offer any type of meaningful and effective technical support to the end users.
With these custom Kodi builds, Kodi users are likely to experience a ton of issues that would otherwise not have occurred had they stuck with official Kodi build.
As mentioned before as well, the chances of one Kodi add-on messing with or breaking another Kodi add-on is high.
If the Kodi user has installed just a bit too many Kodi add-ons then that makes it very difficult for developers to resolve issues related to conflict of these Kodi add-ons.
Perhaps noting the fact that the majority of legit developers only install fifteen or less Kodi addon might stop some Kodi users from going overboard.
Modifications which are outdated.
Now we come to the part where we talk about Kodi builds that come pre-installed with outdated modifications.
What do we mean when we say outdated modifications?
We mean, modifications which might have had relevant a few years ago but at the moment only cause degraded Kodi performance.
More specifically, Kodi modifications that make heavy use of the old “advancedsettings.xml” cache setting option actually do a good job of making the problem of Kodi buffering much worse than before on specific streaming devices.
Perplexing Menus
Kodi provides many addons that come with the capacity to allow users to watch both television shows and movies from the same place.
These add-ons can also, sometimes, play content related to live TV and sports.
A good chunk of Kodi builds mess this up by having multiple menus for multiple categories of video content.
Why would anyone do that?
Commercial mindset
As mentioned in another point as well, some people are only in it to win it.
In other words, they develop add-ons to make money.
Not to provide users with high-quality content via an open source media player.
Such type of developers don’t let an opportunity pass to poison the general Kodi community.
Some have called such developers as delusional.
They have a distorted view of how they can develop Kodi add-ons and get rich overnight.
The thing they don’t understand is that Kodi has only become a sustainable community because of volunteer work.
Volunteers put their heart and soul into doing what they love to do.
We can’t rule out the possibility that some of the Kodi build developers may have hidden agendas as well.
This is a good time to mention that if a Kodi user wants to take advantage of a tool that takes care of all the configuration automatically, then Indigo by TVAddons is as good a choice as any.
Indigo tool comes with a config wizard feature which is great at doing what it is supposed it.
In other words, it makes all of the configurations that a good Kodi build would but does not make any harmful modifications to the user’s Kodi system.
The other great thing about Indigo is that it pre-installs the most popular and trustworthy Kodi add-ons.
These are Kodi add-ons that the community has tested extensively over a long period of time.
Again, Indigo tool, on its own, does not make any major code alterations which may ruin the privacy settings of the device or the system.
Users who have already made the mistake of installing one of the many untrustable Kodi builds out there in the market should use the Indigo tool by TVAddons.
It comes with a Fresh Start feature that is designed to reverse all the bad things that a given Kodi build may introduce.
This feature will first wipe the user’s current Kodi settings and configuration.
After that, it will start the process of reconfiguring the user’s Kodi device.
Conclusion
That is it.
After reading all of that, we are confident that users will now know everything there is to know about all the security risks that come with various Kodi builds.
Not to mention, these Kodi builds also come with performance degradations.
Alot of distributors have got into the business of spreading these untrustworthy Kodi builds.
That is why we felt we needed to take some action by writing about it.
Remember, these Kodi builds do look innocuous enough.
However, we recommend users that they don’t fall into the trap of putting their privacy at any risk.
Again, these Kodi builds don’t just come with privacy issues but also real-time performance issues that always occur because of bad code and what not.