The only promises on the announcement are:&gt; Verify your identity&gt; * You will need to provide and verify your personal details, like your legal name, address, email address, and phone number.
&gt; * If you&#x27;re registering as an organization, you&#x27;ll also need to provide a D-U-N-S number and verify your organization&#x27;s website.
&gt; * You may also need to upload official government ID.Only one of those three applies to organizations.&gt;A note for student and hobbyist developers: we know your needs are different from commercial developers, so we’re creating a separate type of Android Developer Console account for you.Nothing about it says anything about having lighter requirements, just not going through a Play Console link. Even if the requirements end up being &quot;lighter&quot;, the minimum will always be at least &quot;link a Google account&quot;, which is already a massive privacy breach.&gt; It also doesn&#x27;t prevent you from side loading.It absolutely does. Quoting from Google:&gt;Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices.certified Android devices being... 99.9% of all Android devices in existence.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-android-security.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-...</a>

&gt; separate account type that does not have a submission fee or require legal documentsWe do not know yet who will be considered &quot;hobbyist&quot;. I would say they might check the user base. When hitting app installation threshold for let say 1,000 users, they will force you to pass the full legal check. Otherwise they will start blocking any further installations.

If you read the article you&#x27;d see that this is a separate account type that does not have a submission fee or require legal documents. It also doesn&#x27;t prevent you from side loading. It&#x27;s just part of the current scare screen system when it comes to side loading.

Google to make sideloading Android apps _harder_ by _force_ verifying developer identity for 25$ and bunch of legal documents.

Additionally, this kills apps like Revanced, NewPipe, SmartTube that will now be required to give out ID to Google, surely that&#x27;s something they really want to do. All Open source development is at threat, Google&#x27;s absolute dogshit procedures already imposed for the play store now imposed to the entire ecosystem. All for a shitty system that breaks down to &quot;registering package names&quot;. Cool then, guess it&#x27;s time to typo squat on every variant of com.faceboook.app, because users definitely check the package name and not &quot;oh the icon is right and so is the title&quot;.More and more locked down devices, Android source releases only being published once a year, device drivers for reference devices disappearing, and now, verification of all your software for your &quot;security&quot;. The war on general computing is well and truly on.What the absolute fuck.

I agree 100% with you. I am in a similar situation, rooted and unlocked, slowly but surely getting access restricted.Google is trying something which will be a net negative for everybody, instead of keeping this _massive_ USP that also keeps a core userbase. Might as well switch to iOS now, I don&#x27;t have anything which keeps me on Android.

The core benefit of Android over iOS for me has always been that it&#x27;s my device, not Google&#x27;s.They&#x27;ve been chipping away at this over the years. Safetynet was the first offense, but if they start restricting app installation from sources of my choice (I hate the term &quot;sideloading&quot;), there&#x27;s not much advantage left.

I think the only thing hat can save us is a jailbreak. Either for iOS or Android to let you sideload apps.Alternatively, and that’s almost bullshit, the dumb phone trend continues and we might get devices like PDAs. Get a dumb phone and a small camera and then your PDA for everything that is essentially an app. Not sure what OS they’d run but I don’t see another way.

It&#x27;s a good question. I&#x27;ve looked at PinePhone, but last time I looked at it in detail it was light-years outside my needs for usability (very much a &quot;we are CLI authors and are trying our hands at a mobile UI as a hobby&quot; situation).I think I&#x27;ll look into what Android phones are out there that aren&#x27;t glued to the Google Play ecosystem. Side-loading is still a feature the OS core supports even if Google switches it off (for now, and AFAIK the OS is forkable if they press the issue).

I think &quot;disastrous&quot; is a bit too strong of a word, but I don&#x27;t see any &quot;real&quot; reasons mentioned here why it won&#x27;t be. Sure, there are &quot;cheap&quot; phones that are (almost always) Android, it&#x27;s also probably true that &quot;most people&quot; use those and wouldn&#x27;t switch no matter what. But there are also Pixel phones, Samsung Galaxy phones, you know, what people call &quot;flagships&quot;. Why people buy these? It&#x27;s been a long time since they stopped being competitively cheaper they Apple. Even flagship Huawei phones now cost the same as an iPhone. Who buys them? Well, I did. Solely because I couldn&#x27;t install software I want on iPhone. If I truly won&#x27;t be able to install what I want on my Android phone — I don&#x27;t know yet, how I&#x27;ll deal with that issue (surely I&#x27;ll figure it out) but I promise you — I&#x27;ll buy an iPhone for the first time in my life, if only to say &quot;fuck you&quot; to Android. And I urge you to do the same. Vote with your wallet.

I suspect this won&#x27;t be disastrous for Google, because where will people care about this go? Apple, who is even more restrictive? This is just another in a long series of incidents showing why we desperately need a real alternative to the mobile duopoly. I would ditch Android over this, but there&#x27;s no realistic alternative available to me.Damn the future sucks ass.

They recently allowed emulators, like RetroArch, to be on the app store. They still require the emulators to be written in Swift AFAIK. Still quite a bit more restrictive than Android, but they have slowly been opening up.

Android also allows apps that can run arbitrary code, like emulators and various other runtimes. I think iOS still doesn&#x27;t? I have not written an Android app in ages, other than at work, but I often write silly little things running in the Löve 2D Loader, or TIC-80, or DOSBox, or just command-line tools running in Termux (I hear there is an X-server as well to run GUI applications from Termux?).As long as they still allow running stuff inside of apps like that I will probably not abandon ship yet.

This has the potential to be disastrous for Google, but maybe not.Personally: I don&#x27;t use Apple because I like being able to whip together little apps to side-load without having to check in with a walled-garden mothership. If Google is going to move closer to Apple in that regard... Apple&#x27;s UX ecosystem is better, so I have far fewer reason to keep using Android.

Guess whether the makers of alternative YouTube clients will want to tell Google, &quot;Hey, this is a copy of our ID card our address&quot;...

Taking the article at face value, they&#x27;ll have to register with google and have their apps be signed. Presumably this is subject to less review than the play store (eg. you don&#x27;t have to justify your permissions list or whatever[1]), but there&#x27;s no guarantees that developers will bother with the hassle. A lot of developers are willing to put some release up on github, but not dox themselves to google.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41895718">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41895718</a>

What would happen to projects like F-Droid, Termux, etc.?

&gt;GrapheneOS won&#x27;t survive the next generation of devices because bootloader unlocking will also go away (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44765939">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44765939</a>), and without kernel security updates that OS can&#x27;t continue.The comment in the thread you linked directly contradicts the claim that &quot;bootloader unlocking will also go away&quot;.

FOSS means a lot less than it used to in Android.Can you download, build, and install a basic Android system these days without touching a single piece of closed code? Absolutely. Will it be able to do much without closed binaries? No.Android isn&#x27;t GNU&#x2F;Linux where there&#x27;s a general ethos of making everything in userland FOSS if at all possible. Rather, it&#x27;s a free OS that both Google and manufacturers can do anything they want with, including shove a ton of spy and bloatware on it, then make it to where you can&#x27;t get rid of those things, at least not easily.The optimism from 15 years ago surrounding FOSS in the mobile space is on its deathbed.

A phone running just the FOSS parts of Android is not super viable for the average person.

&gt; what purpose does an open source OS have against a proprietary one

&gt; iOS devices [..] have much less data collection than stock AndroidiOS does a tremendous amount of data collection including for the usage of ads as per Apple&#x27;s privacy policy. All the same types of data that stock Android collects, even.You may believe Apple is a generally better steward of that data than Google, but using iOS does not reduce the amount of data being hoovered up in any meaningful capacity.&gt; Now there&#x27;s also no more sideloading, so what purpose does Android even serve anymore?I hate this change, but I still prefer Android. iOS is hardly perfect nor does it do everything better...

&gt; Why even run Android at that point anymore? iOS devices get security updates for longer and have much less data collection than stock Android.Because Google-free AOSP-derived Android distributions are far more versatile, offer far more freedom, impose far fewer restrictions and tend to end up being far less expensive than whatever the fruit factory decides their dedicants have to use today. If Google goes the way of the fruit folks and AOSP no longer offers these freedoms the next step is not to surrender to the Church of Apple but to find a way to evade those restrictions.

Exactly, the only reason to be a weirdo and have android in the first place was because there&#x27;s so many good apps available outside the play store, if they lock it down just like Apple then what&#x27;s the point?

Why even run Android at that point anymore? iOS devices get security updates for longer and have much less data collection than stock Android.GrapheneOS won&#x27;t survive the next generation of devices because bootloader unlocking will also go away (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44765939">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44765939</a>), and without kernel security updates that OS can&#x27;t continue.Now there&#x27;s also no more sideloading, so what purpose does Android even serve anymore?

&quot;Hidden&quot; isn&#x27;t exactly right. It&#x27;s completely inaccessible, unless you use a custom ROM like LineageOS. But it is a real permission:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;develop&#x2F;connectivity&#x2F;network-ops&#x2F;connecting" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;develop&#x2F;connectivity&#x2F;network-o...</a>

&lt;uses-permission android:name=&quot;android.permission.INTERNET&quot; &#x2F;&gt;It&#x27;s been there since Android 1.0.What&#x27;s missing is a way for the user to deny it.

You can deny internet to any specific app.

Can you elaborate a little bit about this hidden internet access control setting?

&gt; 1) Internet connection is so ubiquitous as to just be noise if displayedThat doesn&#x27;t make it any less useful.&gt; 2) It&#x27;s not robust, apps without Internet permission can still exfiltrate data relatively easily by bouncing off of other apps using Intents and similarI&#x27;ve heard claims that the Internet permission is flawed, yes, but I&#x27;ve never managed to find even a single PoC bypassing it. But even if it is flawed, don&#x27;t you think Google would be a bit more incentivized to make the Internet permission work as expected if people could disable it?

It absolutely has to do with ads. While there are various ways to exfiltrate small amounts of data, the non-collaborative ones are rarely silent and most importantly, they won&#x27;t let the app get responses (e.g. ads) back.The main thing this permission would be used for would be blocking ads. Also distinguishing shitty apps that are full of ads from those that aren&#x27;t. If there is a calculator that needs Internet and one that doesn&#x27;t, which one are you going to use?

I mean, I just did a quick look over the installed apps on this phone and ~1&#x2F;4 of them would work perfectly well without an internet connection, things like a level or GPS speedometer that use the phone sensor or apps for Bluetooth control of devices [like 0] . Why would something like a bubble level app need internet access for anything besides telemetry or ads? I realize I have way more of these types of apps than the average user, but apps like this aren&#x27;t a super-niche thing that would be on 0.1% of devices.I just tend to give Google little benefit of the doubt here, considering where their revenue comes from. Same as when they introduced manifest v3, ostensibly for security but just conveniently happening to neuter adblocking. Disabling access to the internet permission for apps aligns with their profit motive.

&gt; But it&#x27;s hidden, apparently because keeping users from using it to block ads on apps is of greater concern to Google than keeping people safe.The internet permission has nothing to do with ads? It&#x27;s a hidden permission because:1) Internet connection is so ubiquitous as to just be noise if displayed2) It&#x27;s not robust, apps without Internet permission can still exfiltrate data relatively easily by bouncing off of other apps using Intents and similar

&gt; had me believing that bypassing the restriction might&#x27;ve been possible by disabling Play Protect, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case since there aren&#x27;t any mentions of it in the official info we&#x27;ve been given.I don&#x27;t think we can know for sure before the change is actually in place. Going through Play Protect would certainly be the easiest way of implementing this - it would be a simple change from &quot;Play Protect rejects known malware&quot; to &quot;Play Protect rejects any app that isn&#x27;t properly notarized&quot;. This would narrowly address the issue where the existing malware checks are made ineffective by pushing some new variant of the malicious app with a different package id.It&#x27;s a big change for the ecosystem nonetheless because it will require all existing developers to register for verification if they want to publish a &quot;legit&quot; app that won&#x27;t be rejected by any common Android device - and the phrasing of the official announcements accurately reflects this. But this says nothing much as of yet about whether power users will be allowed to proactively disable these checks (just like they can turn off Play Protect today, even though very few people do so in practice).

&gt; Typical issue - I want to download an app that&#x27;s not on available &quot;in my country&quot; - because I&#x27;m on a holiday and want to try some local app,The solution here is just to get rid of artificial country limitations which make some users download APKs. None of those make sense in the online world anyways.

&gt; This is such an odd statement. I mean, surely they have to be willing to review the contents of apps at some point (if only to suspend the accounts of developers who are actually producing malware), or else this whole affair does nothing but introduce friction.Requiring company verification helps against some app pretending to be made by a legitimate institution, e.g. your bank.Requiring public key registration for package name protects against package modification with malware. Typical issue - I want to download an app that&#x27;s not on available &quot;in my country&quot; - because I&#x27;m on a holiday and want to try some local app, but my &quot;play store country&quot; is tied to my credit card and the developer only made it available in his own country thinking it would be useless for foreigners. I usually try to download it from APKMirror. APKMirror tries to do signature verification. But I may not find it on APKMirror but only on some sketchy site. The sketchy site may not do any signature verification so I can&#x27;t be sure that I downloaded an original unmodified APK instead of the original APK injected with some malware.Both of these can be done without actually scanning the package contents. They are essentially just equivalents of EV SSL certificates and DANE&#x2F;TLSA from TLS world.

Wouldn&#x27;t that launch the browser app and bring it to the foreground? I wouldn&#x27;t compare that to having full network access.

The ability to launch other apps can be put behind a permission screen too.

&gt; Every time I hear mentions of &quot;safety&quot; from the folks at Google, I&#x27;m reminded that there&#x27;s a hidden Internet permission on Android that can neuter 95% of malicious apps. But it&#x27;s hidden, apparently because keeping users from using it to block ads on apps is of greater concern to Google than keeping people safe.You&#x27;ve never needed the internet permission to exfiltrate data. Just send an intent to the browser app to load a page owned by the attacker with the data to be exfilled in the query parameters.

&lt;&lt; we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came fromTo be honest, it almost makes me wonder if the issue here is not related to security at all. I am not being sarcastic. What I mean is, maybe the issue revolves around some of the issue MS had with github ( sanctions and KYC checks ).

Play Protect is just spyware to monitor app usage &amp; exploitation. It doesn&#x27;t prevent or protect anything.

This is a drastic response, but they didn&#x27;t make up the security threat. Attackers convincing users to side-load malware is a thing.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitdefender.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hotforsecurity&#x2F;hackers-steal-millions-in-crypto-from-android-users-who-sideloaded-trojanized-bitkeep-wallet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitdefender.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;hotforsecurity&#x2F;hacker...</a>

It&#x27;s the security of having happier shareholders, making more money.That&#x27;s still security, albeit an entirely different threat model.

It&#x27;s never about security (at least not user&#x27;s security). It&#x27;s like you pointed out only about power and locking in customers. They don&#x27;t care if your phone gets hacked or you bank account drained. They care about the bottom line. Android is fine. Google should have 2 layers if they&#x27;re worried playstore 1 has only well vetted authors and apps. playstore 2 can be the free for all (mostly) of the current store. These could be two different apps or prominent tags. Choice is good, lock down is bad. Corporate does not like employees or customers to have freedom, that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s our duty to fire people like the current US regime who always side with corporations over customers.

&gt; Of that they still refuse to sandbox the play store.It&#x27;s absolutely essential that Google Play Services have &quot;root&quot; permissions and circumvent the permissions system normal apps have. How else would Google have access to all of your data? :)

&gt; Every time I hear mentions of &quot;safety&quot; from the folks at Google, I&#x27;m reminded that there&#x27;s a hidden Internet permission on Android that can neuter 95% of malicious appsOf that they still refuse to sandbox the play store.It&#x27;s easy to see that there&#x27;s a pattern on what they are copying from GrapheneOS.

The malware makers will use fake or stolen IDs.

There&#x27;s a reason Google is targeting a few specific countries with this first. Malware from APKs downloaded from the internet is more prominent in some countries than in others. The governments themselves are asking for this because educating the public has turned out to be an impossible task for them.Still an awful solution that will get bypassed easily, of course. But there&#x27;s more to this than &quot;Google decided to be a bunch of dicks today&quot;.

You can install unsigned apps on Windows just fine, maybe with one extra nag screen. Plenty of large open source projects don&#x27;t sign their installers - VLC being one big example that many normal people use.

Doesn&#x27;t Windows have the same thing aka Code Signing?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronforge.io&#x2F;guides&#x2F;code-signing&#x2F;code-signing-windows" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.electronforge.io&#x2F;guides&#x2F;code-signing&#x2F;code-signin...</a>

No you can’t enable it, nowadays developer just declare if they want internet permission. Before, user could say « no, I don’t want you to have internet access ».It’s something possible only on grapheneos as far as I know.

What is the hidden internet permission called? Is there any way to enable or see it?

&quot;we all know... Play Store... full of malicious garbage&quot; - please point out how that statement is true, given we all know this apparently.Yes, there are apps out there that try to trick the system and when you use them, instead of looking innocent, it&#x27;s actually a casino app or something. But Google usually finds those. Are there any apps impersonating a bank? Because that is what regular people care about &amp; think of when someone says &quot;malicious&quot;.They don&#x27;t care if an app tracks what other apps are installed, what the user taps on, etc. Arguably they should care, but they don&#x27;t lose money from it.

The future for security conscious will be something like grapheneOS for phones, but a step further where the device can only securely connect to your home computer and access regular software there. If you must, run segregated, whitelist only networking, virtual machine apps

Official announcement: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-android-security.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-...</a>More info:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;googleplay&#x2F;android-developer&#x2F;answer&#x2F;16471116" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;googleplay&#x2F;android-developer&#x2F;answ...</a>Personally...we all know the Play Store is chock full of malicious garbage, so the verification requirements there don&#x27;t do jack to protect users. The way I see it, this is nothing but a power grab, a way for Google to kill apps like Revanced for good. They&#x27;ll just find some bullshit reason to suspend your developer account if you do something they don&#x27;t like.Every time I hear mentions of &quot;safety&quot; from the folks at Google, I&#x27;m reminded that there&#x27;s a hidden Internet permission on Android that can neuter 95% of malicious apps. But it&#x27;s hidden, apparently because keeping users from using it to block ads on apps is of greater concern to Google than keeping people safe.&gt; we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came fromThis is such an odd statement. I mean, surely they have to be willing to review the contents of apps at some point (if only to suspend the accounts of developers who are actually producing malware), or else this whole affair does nothing but introduce friction.TFA had me believing that bypassing the restriction might&#x27;ve been possible by disabling Play Protect, but that doesn&#x27;t seem to be the case since there aren&#x27;t any mentions of it in the official info we&#x27;ve been given.On the flip side, that&#x27;s one less platform I care about supporting with my projects. We&#x27;re down to just Linux and Windows if you&#x27;re not willing to sell your soul (no, I will not be making a Google account) just for the right to develop for a certain platform.

They trialled this in Singapore and I’ve been telling people on Hacker News that it’s been going to happen for a while:&gt; Singapore Android users to be blocked from installing certain unverified apps as part of anti-scam trial (07 Feb 2024)— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;google-android-devices-malware-scam-unverified-apps-sideloading-4102991" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;google-android-dev...</a>It makes total sense to the average person. There has been a constant stream of “yet another Android user got scammed out of their life savings because of Android side loading; iPhone users not affected”It’s an inconvenient fact for power users, but side loading makes users significantly more vulnerable to scams and restricting side loading is both a predictable and reasonable response to that fact.If you don’t like this, you need a better argument than “my desire to run any app I want is more important than pensioners losing their life savings” because that is not a winning argument with the average person, with governments, or with Google&#x2F;Apple.— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44194034">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=44194034</a>&gt; As I’ve mentioned here before, sideloading is a genuine security concern, not merely an excuse for Apple to exert control. There is a never-ending stream of people losing their life savings. It happens on Android and not iOS because Android allows sideloading and iOS doesn’t. There is a very real human cost to this.&gt; Police warn new Android malware scam can factory reset phones; over S$10 million lost in first half of 2023&gt; There have been more than 750 cases of victims downloading the malware into their phones in the first half of 2023, with losses of at least S$10 million (US$7.3 million).— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-malware-sc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-malware-sc</a>...&gt; DBS, UOB become latest banks to restrict access if unverified apps are found on customers&#x27; phones&gt; They are the latest banks in Singapore to do so – after OCBC and Citibank – amid a spate of malware scams targeting users of Android devices.— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;dbs-uob-anti-scam-" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;dbs-uob-anti-scam-</a>...&gt; 74-year-old man loses $70k after downloading third-party app to buy Peking duck&gt; “I couldn’t believe the news. I thought: Why am I so stupid? I was so angry at myself for being cheated of my life savings. My family is frustrated and I ended up quarrelling with my wife,” said Mr Loh, who has three children.— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.straitstimes.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;74-year-old-man-loses" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.straitstimes.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;74-year-old-man-loses</a>...&gt; Singapore Android users to be blocked from installing certain unverified apps as part of anti-scam trial&gt; &quot;Based on our analysis of major fraud malware families that exploit these sensitive runtime permissions, we found that over 95 per cent of installations came from internet-sideloading sources,&quot; it added.— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;anduril-secures-305" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;anduril-secures-305</a>...&gt; CNA Explains: Are Android devices more prone to malware and how do you protect yourself from scams?&gt; Why are scammers more likely to target Android users? How do you spot a fake app and what should you do if your device is infected by malware?— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-malware-sc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-malware-sc</a>...&gt; Nearly 2,000 victims fell for Android malware scams, at least S$34.1 million lost in 2023&gt; In 2023, about 1,899 cases of Android malware scams were reported in Singapore. The average amount lost was about S$17,960.— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-malware-sc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-malware-sc</a>...&gt; Android users in Singapore tried to install unverified apps nearly 900,000 times in past 6 months&gt; These attempts were blocked by a security feature rolled out by Google six months ago as part of a trial to better protect users against malware scams, which led to at least S$34.1 million (US$25.8 million) in losses last year with about 1,900 cases reported.— <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-users-inst" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.channelnewsasia.com&#x2F;singapore&#x2F;android-users-inst</a>...

I feel like that makes the most sense. That this isn&#x27;t something Google thought up but something that the EU wanted to ensure its government ID app was &quot;safe&quot;. Google does benefit but the timing seems to line up.

It makes perfect sense. Clients of Google are businesses and governments, not users of free products. They used to be less open about it until recently

&gt; Google notes “supportive initial feedback” from government authorities and other parties:Ah, then I guess everything is fine. I&#x27;m sure they aren&#x27;t in favour because it gives governments greater control over what apps we&#x27;re allowed to have on our phones. That would be absurd.

I miss K9.-- Apologies for my brevity.... --

That might be one of the reasons. Get rid of competition by legal means.In my case I keep a copy of K9 Mail 5.6 with the original UI (the reason I choose K9) and I sideload it to every device of mine. I&#x27;m afraid that I&#x27;ll have to register an account and what, claim that that K9 is mine?

Sorry, we&#x27;re getting rid of Revanced, Newpipe, Xmanager, etc. for your own good. Just like how Manifest v3 was for security. &#x2F;s

There are tons of things you can do, from spreading the word, organize politically or work on building an alternative ecosystem. Also donate to organizations like EFF.We&#x27;re being pushed a message that we&#x27;re all impotent but the reality is that collectively we can change things, and apathy is exactly what these people try to push onto us.Things get worse but there are also good laws being pushed: see for example digital markets act and GDPR. 2008 when I started using Linux, gaming on Linux was horrible. Now it&#x27;s day and night, and linux, while still small, is more popular and usable than ever. Recently alternative social medias like Bluesky, and Mastodon enable more open ecosystems and they&#x27;ve gained a lot of traction.Android has alternative ecosystems like F-Droid and GrapheneOS that can be built upon and hopefully we can get it to a point where we can ditch Google. We need to keep up the fight.

Yep. I feel powerless, and I don&#x27;t know what to do. I don&#x27;t think there is anything I can do, except for watch all of technology get locked down to the point that you need a monopolist&#x27;s or a government&#x27;s permission before you do anything with it.It&#x27;s so fundamentally depressing, and completely at odds with how I grew up viewing tech.

@hollow-moe do you have a reference to &quot;Apple getting away with notarization under the DMA&quot;?

They saw Apple getting away with notarization under the DMA so they&#x27;re doing the same.
I must admit the mass demotivation strategy is working really well. Seeing this kind of news every single day, affecting you directly and not even being able to do anything

For what conceivable reason would they make the users go on desktop, considering mobile is in the process of being fully locked down?If anything, they&#x27;d eventually deny access from desktop, forcing everyone to login via the fully manages mobile devices without any user freedom.Some banks are already getting there btw, as their preferred 2fa is a companion app... One small step away from making that the only option, effectively denying access to anyone without a locked down mobile device.

De facto, this is already the case - you can use your computer as a display but to actually authorize a login or transaction you need your phone with said attestation.

A dedicated app on a locked down OS is vastly more controllable than something like a browser that can do virtually whatever it wants.

Actually my bank already requires me to use the phone app for any operation on the website. When I want to login from my laptop I need to use my phone with their app to approve the login, same for almost any operation.Ah, and it can only be installed in one device at the same time :D Don&#x27;t have your phone available? Bad luck for you

How it generally works iso low risk operations have no restrictions, but if you want to send a large amount of money to a new contact, the banks make you approve the transaction on the phone app.Phone apps are generally significantly more trusted because of the fact you can’t install malware that steals the session token, and they can do a Face ID check before any risky operations.

In time, you will only be able to access banking from your desktop using an approved OS and browser with attestation...

Is it confirmed that we will even be able to disable this?

How will you login to the banking app in the browser without a locked down phone? In Germany, MFA is enforced and with many banks the only allowed second factor is an app on a phone.

I&#x27;ll just have to disable it and choose a banking app that works on the browser.  Tonnes of my apps are sideloaded.  Quite a few are on the playstore or the dev might upload their details.

Banking apps were at the forefront of freedom-eroding &quot;safety&quot; for a long time now.

So that&#x27;s it then.If this actually goes through, there will be no option in the mobile OS market for an OS that both:a) allows the installation of apps without any contractual relationship with any party, andb) allows the use of mainstream and secure apps like banking

I&#x27;m curious why you need a phone for banking at all, at home as you say. Wouldn&#x27;t a laptop suffice? Granted, not all banks have a web app these days

This was the first thing that crossed my mind. If it’s not too much money and hassle I could buy a second device for GrapheneOS and tether to the cheapest phone I can get for the official ecosystem.Really though, it doesn’t have enough impact for consumers. If I get unfairly banned as a developer, no one even notices because that’s nothing more than an opportunity for another developer to step in.Individually we have no power :-(

ding ding ding a second phone is the correct answer

I wonder if you could keep your &quot;snitch&quot; android phone home by instrumentalizing it, enabling you to access it remotely on your main linux&#x2F;degoogled android phone. It might not even be that outrageous of an idea since there are tons of botfarms that are essentially stacks and stacks of legit phones being remotely controlled... the tech might be there already, just need to adapt if for something good...

I&#x27;m thinking it&#x27;s time for a 2nd phone (in my case old one from cupboard) to become the regular daily GrapheneOS enabled driver and then keep a modern Google(tm) updated one at home for all the &quot;official crap&quot; whenever needed. That way I can also separate banking &#x2F; paypal &#x2F; etc. from my carry phone with all it&#x27;s various apps that I trust to varying degrees.

I just got a letter from my bank stating this. Website is going away, app only access. It&#x27;s very disappointing, for security I never have any banking access on my mobile devices

Don&#x27;t worry, they&#x27;ll stop letting you access your bank without an app soon enough. Gotta protect the children and what-not.

I have been looking into this as well. There are a few devices from GPD Win that are smaller than the Steam Deck but also have a physical keyboard.

That&#x27;s indeed what I&#x27;m planning to do but I&#x27;ll buy a Steam Deck

This is crazy. I can&#x27;t install my own apps on my own phone anymore.I am gonna start carrying around a laptop with a 5G modem instead.

I had to do a government ID upload and a live face scan to install my banking app on a new phone even though I had other devices I could have used to authorize it.  It made me want to switch banks, but where do you go?

For what it&#x27;s worth, Venmo will not get access to your biometrics data, it&#x27;s a black box in which you specify a desired level of authentication and the OS just returns ok&#x2F;not ok.It is, however, to make you use Venmo more easily, thus more often, thus spend more money through them.

&quot;Just yesterday, an app that directly impacts my money, asked me to make it more secure&quot; - how did you survive?Vemno doesn&#x27;t get your bio data, it just gets a true or false from the OS.

We&#x27;re in the era of less control, more surveillance, more &quot;security&quot;, more being treated like a child and lied to.Just yesterday I got a venmo prompt to add biometrics for &quot;security&quot;. F off.

Last week.  The bags I’m holding for Intel got a little lighter.  Lmao.

&gt; What was the last time there were some actually good news in big tech?The issue is that the good news are often incremental, while the bad news come in large steps, which makes them much more noticeable.

What was the last time there were some actually good news in big tech? For those that don&#x27;t hold stocks I mean.

&quot;Can?&quot;
Sure.&quot;Would?&quot;
Google has zero incentive to do that.

The risk is Google could ban all F-Droid apps in one step, which will happen for sure.

Maybe F-Droid can sign all packages themselves? Would google let them do that?

I&#x27;m entirely on F-Droid, with no Google account and no Play Store. Losing F-Droid would force me off Android.

Would be a tragedy if it did. So many interesting and useful apps there without the obnoxious ads or nagging to upgrade.

Only for all the developers on F-Droid who refuse to register with Google...

Free choice in the market is a lie anyhow. You are limited by what is actually been made available in the marketplace in sufficient quantity. &quot;You can have any color you want, so long as it is black.&quot; - some old racist industrialist.

An interesting idea. But who would have to &quot;stick&quot; to such software? The users?It seems to me that most of the users do not care much about what kind of software their phone runs, unfortunately. As long as it works with Instagram or whatever other big brand social media is trending these days, they are happy. Which is I think understandable.The companies developing the apps are in my opinion driving this cultural shift. And they are doing it mostly because it brings them commercial advantages. Which is, I think, also understandable.Everyone involved seems to to what appears to be in their best interest. And yet, collectively, we as a society get a worse outcome overall. This phenomenon perhaps has a name.In order to break out of it, I think that the incentives on both sides need to be adjusted. It needs to be in the companies&#x27; interest to produce apps as open source. And the users need to want them.The only way I can think of to achieve that kind of a change is when the open source apps and products become just inherently better than their proprietary alternatives. In all categories. Then, the people would want them. And then the companies will start to produce them.It is a very tough goal. The commercial apps do not have to be better in all categories to retain their users. They can use vendor locks or other business strategies which restrict the users&#x27; ability to leave them.Open source apps cannot do such things. The only fair ground on which they can compete is their quality.

In practice we see the reverse and GPL projects being rewritten as more permissive.The busybox&#x2F;toybox case looks especially relevant and interesting:&gt; In January 2012 the proposal of creating a BSD license alternative to the GPL licensed BusyBox project drew harsh criticism (…). Rob Landley, who had started the BusyBox-based lawsuits, responded that this was intentional, explaining that the lawsuits had not benefited the project but that they had led to corporate avoidance, expressing a desire to stop the lawsuits &quot;in whatever way I see fit&quot;.source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Toybox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Toybox</a>

Sure, but just the regular GPLv3 would have been good enough to prevent this particular abuse.

&quot;The fact that the GPLv3 didn&#x27;t close the network hole is a decision made either out of myopia or abject cowardice, you shouldn&#x27;t need a separate license (AGPLv3) to ensure true freedom of the codebase.&quot;Google was successful in lobbying the FSF to have 2 licences (GPLv3 and AGPLv3) instead of 1 (GPLv3 covering web services).

You are 100% correct.Such a shame that the Free Software Foundation has been such an awful steward of the GPL. The fact that the GPLv3 didn&#x27;t close the network hole is a decision made either out of myopia or abject cowardice, you shouldn&#x27;t need a separate license (AGPLv3) to ensure true freedom of the codebase.

I cannot resist the urge to point out that we wouldn&#x27;t have had this problem if people actually sticked to free software instead of &quot;commercial use friendly&quot; open source licensing

There has to be a threshold where enshittification has been pushed so far that nerd software becomes the thing cool kids boast about running.Where a less restricted device can do cool things nobody else can do.

&gt; we would share Java phone games at school via Bluetooth. I’d assume kids these days generally don’t anymore.I am both happy (from a user-friendliness point of view) and sad (from a &quot;works offline&quot; perspective) that F-Droid&#x27;s share button now shares a link that will show them info about the app with an option to install the software, instead of the share button directly giving you an APK file with no way to link someone to the &#x27;store&#x27; page. I&#x27;d personally still know how to send people APKs via hotspot or bluetooth (such as for peer-to-peer voice&#x2F;message apps) but a lot of people won&#x27;tThis move from sending each other software to sending each other links to centralized platforms has been long ongoing. Most messaging systems don&#x27;t allow you to send executable (.exe, .apk, .sh, etc.) files anymore. And I believe that virtually all of them individually do it for your own good, but the combined result is a societal shift

This is an unfortunate side-effect of modern UX thinking: people don&#x27;t need to learn anything and sure enough there is no tech-literacy now.People barely know what a file-system is these days.

I think a big problem is that the users have been trained to accept the status quo. I mean back in the Feature phone days we would share Java phone games at school via Bluetooth. I’d assume kids these days generally don’t anymore.Also, due to the cost of physical media piracy was rampant even amongst boomers. People knew and had the option to buy a dvd player that could play video cd because that’s how movies were ripped.Even during the early iPhones we were so stripped of even basic features that a jailbreak was 100% required if you wanted to even basic things like taking videos or changing the Home Screen background.None of this is necessary anymore. The users gets the phone and it just works from their perspective at least.So who is going to try to run a business off of nerds like us who want to have this sort of control over our devices (I’d call it freedom but the average user doesn’t feel unfree)?

Phones are hard because of certification requirements.PDAs, now... have a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clockworkpi.com&#x2F;home-uconsole" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.clockworkpi.com&#x2F;home-uconsole</a>

A linux-based phone... with an 18650 battery slot... with a keyboard... and a meshtastic radio... drool.

Time for a Steam Phone. Or FirefoxOS reloaded. The general purpose mobile computing market must be sizeable. I cannot believe everybody just puts up with these increasingly draconic  restrictions.

So, now there will be a single kill switch where a malicious government can legally compel Google to annihilate apps not of their liking.I find it hard to state how contemptible this is. How stupid. Everyone who worked on this has blood on their hands.

There shouldn&#x27;t be any side effects other than rendering Play Protect inert. No other AOSP component relies on this setting.

How long until Google decides to lock it down because  &quot;scammers&quot; can &quot;abuse&quot; it?

I really hope this ends up being possible! Play Protect seems to jump up every so often and try to scare me into turning it on.  Very annoying. I&#x27;ve wanted to disable Play Protect permanently, but never did the query to learn how, so thank you.

Would be a real shame if this also nuked your safetynet trust score if they realize too many people are using this escape hatch...

Ironic that Google&#x27;s supposed concern for avoiding malware will cause people to turn off their malware scanner.

I really hope this is done via Play Protect. You can also disable it temporarily in Google Play and install whatever you want.

I kinda feel like they&#x27;ll make sure any workaround for this will ensure you can&#x27;t use banking apps, Google Pay, etc.

There&#x27;s also the related &quot;Verify apps over USB&quot; setting which is even exposed in the developer mode settings GUI.

If this is enforced via Play Protect, then the whole mechanism can likely be disabled with:<pre><code> adb shell settings put global package_verifier_user_consent -1
</code></pre>
This does not require root access and prevents Android from invoking Play Protect in the first place. (This is what AOSP&#x27;s own test suite does, along with other test suites in eg. Unreal Engine, etc.)I personally won&#x27;t be doing this verification for my open-source apps. I have no interest in any kind of business relationship with anyone just to publish an .apk. If that limits those who can install it to people who disable Play Protect globally, then oh well.

It seems that it was only about time… it just feels like the pace of enshittification with big tech being able to get away with anything is crazy!I’m hoping that projects like Precursor can take off because we’ve buried ourselves in such mountain of complexity that seems like only a billion&#x2F;trillion dollar big tech company can make an OS.But then again, some body called BS on browsers and we might have a good option soon in Ladybug!<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;sutajio-kosagi&#x2F;precursor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;sutajio-kosagi&#x2F;precursor</a>

The new face of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

As a developer of android apps that get distributed outside of the Play store, a Google identity verification system sounds like a nightmare.  What if I&#x27;m deemed to be politically incorrect?  Will Google brand safety exclude me?

Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-android-security.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-...</a> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45016602">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45016602</a>)

The Developer&#x27;s Alliance address is a coworking space in Washington DC, if you want to rate the likelihood it&#x27;s just an astroturf for public tech policy wonks.

&gt; developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to usersYou have here Google making a statement it can&#x27;t actually fulfill and one that it knows it can&#x27;t fulfill. So Google is willfully lying here.The minute Google has a technical capability to control what applications run on Android it&#x27;s out of their hands. It is in the hands of courts, governments, dictators and authoritarians. That&#x27;s just the nature of the world - Google has to obey the law and Google doesn&#x27;t make the laws.I guess it sounds hysterical, but in that sense, this is an absolutely massive loss of freedom for the entire planet as communication power that rested with individual choice is now transferred wholesale back to governments by this decision.

&gt; developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users through sideloading or to use any app store they prefer. We believe this is how an open system should work—by preserving choice while enhancing security for everyoneI guess words don&#x27;t don&#x27;t have meaning anymore, how can you claim to have an open system in an announcement about closing it down?It&#x27;s also telling that the big supporters of this are apparently corporations and governments. Admittedly I don&#x27;t know what &quot;Developer&#x27;s Alliance&quot; is but they don&#x27;t seem to care about developers very much, and I wouldn&#x27;t surprised if they were just a &quot;pay us to say what you&#x27;re doing is good for devs&quot; kind of thing

I don&#x27;t understand, when the EU announced that Apples &quot;actually we need to sign all of these and pay us&quot; requirement is illegal, Google was like &quot;hold my beer&quot;?Break them up already, it&#x27;s getting old.

Google was always dystopian and evil. They just wore good mask for some time in the beginning.

Google is really turning into a dystopian company, destroying any goodwill their virtuous employees created in the past. It feels like they are primed to be the main turnkey tyranny facilitators.

Well this is me moving to E&#x2F;OS full time.

Juggling between Maemo and iOS back in the day I always thought it was so wild that I later years people thought of Android as the open alternative.

if we continue this direction, in a couple of years, a feature phone might be an excellent choice!

I wouldn&#x27;t be so sure. The DMA is very much against gatekeeping and a couple of days ago Google lost in court to 1&amp;1 (in Germany) regarding keeping Android users in a walled garden [0]. This is in appeal now. We&#x27;ll see.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdfheute.de&#x2F;wirtschaft&#x2F;unternehmen&#x2F;gmx-google-playstore-mailadresse-urteil-100.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zdfheute.de&#x2F;wirtschaft&#x2F;unternehmen&#x2F;gmx-google-pl...</a> in German, I&#x27;m afraid

It is. Notarization like Apple does is also legal. In fact the EU commission would welcome this with open arms since they can now access the personal data of every developer and can order Google to ban every app they want. This goes hand-in-hand with their new &quot;Digital wallet&quot; app that will be launched next year.

Hopefully this increases the communal pressure to find a real alternative to android.

That&#x27;s the first step toward banning NSFW apps like on Steam, I&#x27;m afraid.

That notice already exists. In fact there are 2 or 3 extra confirmations required to sideload apps today.

What they say they want to accomplish could be almost 100% accomplished with self signed certificates. Or public certificates like letsencrypt etc. if you absolutely have to have third party attestation of the key.The fact they incidentally position themselves as the only gatekeepers rather than accomplishing the same without doing that tells you all you need to know about their intent.

The article didn&#x27;t say much about the account approval process, but from the looks of it Google will be able to arbitrarily accept and revoke applications as they see fit. So much for an open platform, bring forth the gatekeeping!Personally I would be fine with unsigned apps requiring the user to click through a notice before install, or having a setting to toggle to enable unsigned apps. Windows does something similar to this where unsigned binaries get a pop up warning but signed ones are executed immediately.

In legal jurisdictions where Apple is forced to allow it, yes. They have a similar scheme for requiring developers to register and are demanding per-install fees for popular apps, though I&#x27;m not sure that will survive regulatory scrutiny in the EU.Otherwise, I think it&#x27;s possible to use developer tools to temporarily install apps on an iPhone. IIRC this requires a Mac and has to be repeated every few days.

There&#x27;s a technical possibility, but it&#x27;s not a thing, as in there&#x27;s not a lot of iPhone users interested in that

Yep, available to anyone. It&#x27;s much more restrictive though. Basically you need a valid developer certificate to sign apps. You can use your own with a free developer account but you only get so many tokens per week and apps need to have their tokens refreshed weekly.You can also use an enterprise developer certificate that lasts forever but if Apple revokes it then the app stops working until you get another working cert.It does require you to turn on iOS developer settings by connecting to a Mac with Xcode installed to enable but then you can manage app installation and refreshing via an App Store like Alt Store. EU has different system where there is no limit on amount of sideloadable apps but the apps still need to be approved by Apple. Alt Store also have a EU specific App Store for that purpose.I side loaded on iOS for a long time. Get Youtube++ for ad free and I forget the Reddit client I used that was side loaded as well. You can run the server on any PC or Mac that will handle side loaded apps and being on the same WiFi network allows the server to automatically refresh the installed apps. Only big downside is updates are not automatic or simple. To update an app you have to download the new app .ipa and then sign it like you were installing it fresh. Usually it picks up the existing configs and data though. So it&#x27;s not a full app wipe.The sideloaded subreddit is where I got into it through.

&gt; Wasn’t Apple the one actually caught throttling devices with an update to slow phones down under the guise of &quot;saving batteryIt wasn’t guise, it actually increased the battery life quite much. People complained about the battery of old phones. The problem was that users did not have choice to opt-out.

&gt; Wasn’t Apple the one actually caught throttling devices with an update to slow phones down under the guise of &quot;saving battery&quot;?That’s not a true story.

&gt; Wasn’t Apple the one actually caught throttling devices with an update to slow phones down under the guise of &quot;saving battery&quot;?Nope. There was an issue in iPhones and Nexus phones that had been used for a few years where a worn battery could no longer maintain a voltage high enough to meet instantaneous SOC power demand, resulting in unexpected device shut downs.Apple got the device to quit shutting off without warning by throttling older devices and Google did nothing and just told users to buy a new device.They both got sued, and both lost.&gt; If you currently or formerly owned a Google Nexus 6P smartphone, we have some good news: you might be eligible for a cash rebate for those bootloops and spontaneous shutdowns the device was known for.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidauthority.com&#x2F;nexus-6p-lawsuit-2019-975474&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.androidauthority.com&#x2F;nexus-6p-lawsuit-2019-97547...</a>

Apple throttled devices that had a weak battery, because the alternative is the CPU trying to draw more power than the battery can deliver, the voltage sagging, and the phone rebooting.By itself, this throttling is a good thing and keeps phones usable for longer, because a phone that is slow is better than a phone that randomly reboots.The problematic part was that they a) didn&#x27;t disclose it, and b) did this for phones within the warranty period, so instead of the phone visibly crashing and you returning the obviously broken phone, it just lost performance which you might not have noticed in time to get a free replacement.

No, the batteries had degraded to the point that they could not supply enough voltage and current to stably run the chip at full frequency. Replacing the battery would restore full performance.

&gt; Wasn’t Apple the one actually caught throttling devices with an update to slow phones down under the guise of &quot;saving battery&quot;?It&#x27;s not about &#x27;saving battery&#x27; its about preventing undervoltage that janks everything up.Having dealt with more than one windows phone that didn&#x27;t have this feature or had it in a bad way (i.e. 520&#x2F;521 would just &#x27;reboot&#x27;, 640 and 950XL would just kill an app) I wish Microsoft would have figured that crap out lol.

No one is expecting Apple to be more open.  It&#x27;s just that the reasons for choosing Android over iOS have been slowly chipped away over time, and soon enough there won&#x27;t be a big reason to choose one over the other.

Wasn’t Apple the one actually caught throttling devices with an update to slow phones down under the guise of &quot;saving battery&quot;?Leaving Google for Apple, and expecting a more open app store, is going to be disappointing. I’m not a Google fanboy by any means, just pointing out the landscape out there

I&#x27;m aware, I&#x27;m saying Google is trending towards being as abusive with their software practices as Apple already is, not worse.And saying that for me anyways the only reason I have an Android and not an IPhone is because they were less abusive. On unrelated metrics like hardware quality Apple generally seems to do better.

&gt; As mentioned in OP, Apple is doing the same thing.The thing is that if Google choses to make Android OS as closed as iOS, I&#x27;d rather use an iPhone than an Android phone...

Precisely. If I can&#x27;t control what I put on my Android phone anymore, I no longer have any reason to use an Android. iPhones have normal USB ports now, and that was the other big barrier.

&gt; Google doesn&#x27;t make better phones, they were just less hostile to the consumer.And the person you&#x27;re responding to was pretty clear that the issue if they both do the same thing, Google has no edge in devices.

If both systems are similar in terms of features and freedom, then I might as well choose the one that tracks me less and offers a more polished experience.

In the high-end smartphone market, using an OS from a giant ad company is already a compromise for freedom. But if that freedom vanishes, why bother? Apple&#x27;s hardware and software outclass Google&#x27;s. And with E2EE for cloud data, I&#x27;d at least stop compromising.

As mentioned in OP, Apple is doing the same thing.

Google is doing everything in their power to make me move to an iphone... between shit like this, effectively bricking some old models of pixels with un-rollbackable patches that destroy batteries, closing down the android development process, making absurd testing requirements to publish apps, etc.Google doesn&#x27;t make better phones, they were just less hostile to the consumer. That seems to be going away :(

Soon you won&#x27;t be able to do this either because most manufacturers are locking down the bootloader.

Attestation &amp; Play Integrity is having a good go at blocking this: lots of critical software (e.g. the app required to use your bank account) requires certified attested devices, and Google are pushing hard to get as many apps as possible to activate that for &quot;security&quot;, making non-Google Android un fixably 2nd tier in functionality.

Most vendors, including the big ones, don&#x27;t play well with that.  Google just revoked open sourcing the Pixel as the reference design which was the strongest option for that.  Things like newer Samsungs are black boxes and everyone is actively making it harder to do anything with devices you bought and paid for.

The number of people able to do that is fewer than those willing to send in copies of overnment IDs. Phones compatible with AOSP builds are rare outside small bubbles of Pixel users as well.

It&#x27;s increasingly difficult to get current hardware for which an alternative OS is available, and which is not locked.Right now, it seems to be fairphone or pixel, or old phones which are not easy to obtain. Samsung have announced they will lock their phones, and how long before google locks pixels?

What&#x27;s wrong with loading an alternate OS that isn&#x27;t Play Protect certified?

If enough people internal at Google get pissed off and raise this up enough it can legitimately get rolled back.

Agree and disagree: the pressure on unity worked, and Sonos and, IIRC on Google&#x27;s &quot;federated cohorts&quot; idea.But often people try to project their opinions onto &quot;the people&quot; and predict they will rise up, and there&#x27;s probably 100 predictions in comment sections that are completely spurious to every one that actually happensSo I&#x27;m not sure, but if I had to guess this one is a rare case where there may be real prospect of backlash.

&gt; the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back.This is political fantasy. There is no mechanism for &quot;the people&quot; to force anyone to roll this back. They can vote for the candidate owned by google, or the candidate owned by google. If they want to find another candidate, they&#x27;ll have to use google to find one.

Well it seems like the UK gave up their ridiculous &quot;backdoor&quot; fight with Apple, so maybe there&#x27;s hope.

More people should&#x27;ve supported Mangione.

I mean, you&#x27;re pretty optimistic that the current fascism is going away any time soon.

This is a lot more complicated than that. I&#x27;m not sure how I feel about the demand for government ID. The demand for money that comes with the app stores I find to be a problem and so does the EU, that was a big point of the DMA. It remains to be seen how those regulations play out. Maybe the DMA won&#x27;t do what I want. But the DMA seems to be aimed at this sort of thing, even if it actually has the same sort of requirements around government ID, it does require openness.

In this instance, quantity isn’t as important. The people it upsets are a loud bunch of a great deal of influence.

Recent precedent suggests it only takes one really angry person to get a company to reconsider its course of action. The problem is software devs are far too comfortable for such action.

&gt; This won&#x27;t end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angryThe amount of people this makes angry is so minuscule that it probably wouldn’t even pass one of those theatrical “sign this petition to get the government to discuss it” thingy. Mind you, the only reason the whole side-loading court cases were going forward is because a giganormous company (Epic) wanted to make more money instead of paying the Google&#x2F;Apple tax. Not because some people were angry.

No, it&#x27;s not similar.There are two OS platforms for desktop&#x2F;laptop usage:
MacOS
WindowsThese both contain ways to run arbitrary compiled code from an arbitrary source -- like a computer should. Losing this feature of our smartphones should have everyone concerned.

&gt; This is the worst thing to happen to technology in recent times since there is only two major phone OS&#x27;s.I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s it. The desktop OS situation has historically be similar with 2 major large players and a bunch of insignificant ones.This comes down to user expectation.

My estimate is less optimistic: 99% of users won&#x27;t ever be bothered with this news nor notice that anything changed, and of those who will, 90% will like it, because &#x27;less malware&#x27; is the only thing they can work with.The weirdest thing to me is that those people who actually care about this are most likely the ones capable of implementing this shit: developers. Us. Who else but developers (OK, and maybe their enlightened spouses) cares about this? We are digging our own graves, basically.So, Google devels: refuse this. And tell your willing colleague that they are not welcome at your birthday party if they do it.

&gt; This won&#x27;t end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back.This makes me quite angry, but I guarantee more than 90% of Android users will not be bothered too much about this. Many of them will actually like it, and most of those who don&#x27;t will just shrug and go on with their day.

Over a billion people use iOS and more would have if they could afford it. These companies have big data and they know how many people it’ll affect&#x2F;annoy. You are outnumbered.

If a government was to plan something like that, there would be protest in front of the parliament. Were are the protest in front of Google main office? If there are a few hundreds of angry developers handing out flyers at Google employees on there way to the office, explaining how bad is Google, maybe Google will move, because they care about the bad publicity. Open source developers involved with Android and app in California should walk in front of Google offices to protest.

Society deserves whatever&#x27;s coming for it. Look how vain and stupid we&#x27;ve become.

This is the worst thing to happen to technology in recent times since there is only two major phone OS&#x27;s.It isn&#x27;t possible to ban encryption, so the governments have to chip away at security and privacy using these techniques.From: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification</a>&quot;You may also need to upload official government ID.&quot;This won&#x27;t end well for Google or the governments involved when the people get so angry that they are forced to roll this back. Switch to an alternative phone OS.

I have good memories about a website with ELF&#x27;s for the Siemens phones. Its name had &quot;kebab&quot; in it. By any chance, was it you running it?

AFAIK in some countries (US?) phones were usually sold locked in a sense that you could only install J2ME midlets published by your mobile provider, who&#x27;d nickel and dime both users and devs for the privilege.

I don&#x27;t recall having to send government ID to any companies to publish MIDlets back in the day. I just uploaded them to getjar.

Mobile phone platforms are reverting back to the pre-iOS&#x2F;Android reality where you have to jump through tons of hoops to even make an app let alone run a viable business with it.

A laptop is far too big, and banking apps and the likes would refuse to run in your VM.

Sounds like you want a laptop with a built-in LTE modem running Android inside a VM.

this reads like the infamous HN Dropbox comment. It shouldn&#x27;t have to bee like this.

The set up I run consists of an older 5g phone that hospots to my other phone, no apps of consiquence on either phone, I sign into my email through web mail, and sign into banking through a browser, all of my apps come from fdroid and similar, mostly used for media, manual updates for those through the fdroid web site.As to the device you mention, it should be possible to take a phone apart and spoof* all of the mic&#x27;s and cameras, likely the gps, and haptic motor and speakers as well, and have a 5g touch screen modem with plain internet, or keep the speakers and it&#x27;s a media device, or put all the audio on a micro switch.
* use matched resistors, or black out the sensors
detach the antena for gps
lets just say I realy dont like bieng advertised to

Agreed, I ditched my spy-phone.I&#x27;m using a tp-link M7000 with 4G, for SMS and wifi modem. A simple http page for send and receive SMS. I use the API to have my ZigBee gear SMS me.I showed my dumb-phone to my bank and asked if I needed to close my account, suddenly card reader was still available as an option. If it becomes mandatory, they can buy me a phone.It should not become the rule that we need a spy-phone, or any other BigTech services to take part in society. So I make my life hard work to defend that principle.Hence I am hacking away with Zig on the PinePhone, since it has some nice hardware switches for switching off modem&#x2F;GPS mic etc. But the modem itself is still a blackbox, so there will always be trust issues there.

These days I don&#x27;t really want a smartphone at all, but begrudgingly use one for things like mobile banking, receiving SMS tokens, etc.If someone made a screenless powerbank-shaped Android device, I might be interested. The device would double as a 5g wifi modem, and to access the UI you&#x27;d remote in over VNC from a laptop, or unrestricted mobile device like a PinePhone.

Yeah, I think anything that  has Google Play would fit that qualifier. So that&#x27;s basically all major devices (in the West, at least). Oof.

&gt; The changes will affect all certified Android devices once liveI think that is a yes, it will affect Samsung

Phew! I was just about to get the new Pixel too, not going to now. I wonder if Samsung will be effected.

They usually fight harder against such laws if they don’t suit them.

While I like to jump on the Google bash train as much as anyone, this is to comply with EU laws.Apple implemented a similar change for the EU App Store earlier this year to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA), a regulation that now requires app developers to provide their “trader status” to submit new apps or app updates for distribution.

Also <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;google-will-require-developer-verification-for-android-apps-outside-the-play-store&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;25&#x2F;google-will-require-develo...</a> (from merged thread)Official announcement 1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-android-security.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;08&#x2F;elevating-...</a>Official announcement 2: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification</a>Play Console Help: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;googleplay&#x2F;android-developer&#x2F;answer&#x2F;16471116" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.google.com&#x2F;googleplay&#x2F;android-developer&#x2F;answ...</a>

Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android