The rumors that I have heard (and one government document I read that was poorly translated from Thai) is that there are some countries who are pressuring Google on this to combat info-stealing malware. Apparently, account-takeover&#x2F;theft is very prevalent in SE Asia where most banking is done via Android phones.

&gt; Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it&#x27;s not very goodHonestly having gone back and forth between iOS and Android every three years or so, both OS are the same. It&#x27;s not like the grass is really greener on the Apple side. The UX is virtually identical for anything that matters. Personally I put material Android above liquid glass iOS. The alleged polish of the Apple UX was lost on me when I had my last iphone.The reason Google&#x27;s moves are surprising has more to do with them embracing being a service player more and more with the arrival of Gemini and them having regulators breathing down their necks everywhere.I guess they did it after the truly baffling US decision in the Epic trial but it&#x27;s very likely to go against them in the EU.

&gt;Come on, that&#x27;s absolutely laughable.It&#x27;s not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices.It&#x27;s going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of &quot;phone calls only mode&quot; and forced us to rely on their half-baked &quot;priority mode&quot; that&#x27;s an opaque shitshow.When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper &quot;phone calls only&quot;.Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it&#x27;s better.

&gt; &quot;Temu iOS&quot;Come on, that&#x27;s absolutely laughable.There are several topics where Android is significantly ahead to the point that iOS is just a toy, and there are areas where the reverse is true.And I say that as a recent convert, so it&#x27;s not like I have a decade out of date view of any of the OSs. In my experience I had more visual bugs in case of iOS than android (volume slider not displaying correctly in certain cases when the content was rotated as a very annoying example).

Yep it&#x27;s definitely on my list but my Pixel is on its last legs and I&#x27;m considering going back to iOS.

Have you considered Graphene since you own a Pixel? It&#x27;s a huge upgrade over the stock OS in terms of security, privacy and general reduction of bloat.

From a marketing standpoint it seems like a baffling decision on Google&#x27;s part.I own a Pixel and while the hardware seems decent, I&#x27;ve had a buggy and annoying experience with Android, and it&#x27;s been getting worse lately.Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it&#x27;s not very good. That&#x27;s like Microsoft thinking people use Teams because of its merits.People buy Android phones because they can be had cheaper than an equivalent iPhone and because in spite of the buggy and inconsistent mess of an OS, you aren&#x27;t beholden to Apple&#x27;s regimented UX. Locking down Android will not give it a &quot;premium experience&quot;... It&#x27;ll always just be &quot;Temu iOS&quot; at best.

No idea why you are even bringing this up. It works just fine right now.

90% of your usage on your phone is banking apps or NFC payments? That seems hard to believe.

I run Graphene on my Pixel and banking apps just work. There is no Google Pay, obviously, since Google dependencies have been stripped out from the system. I just carry a credit card.

&gt;this mostly means using the closed android ecosystemMaybe, but there&#x27;s no technical reason for this. As I&#x27;ve mentioned before, I can do banking just fine on my Gentoo machine where the entire corpus of software on it, is FOSS and compiled by myself.

If I can&#x27;t use banking or my NFC wallets on my phone, it has become 90% useless. The other 10% of usefulness is texting and calls, which every other phone can do.Unfortunately, this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem.

The line between a phone and a computer is what has been perforated. What I need is a modem. I don&#x27;t need the modem baked into a computer that has a permanently affixed screen and battery. That then pretends to be some kind of secure enclave for my deepest secrets.&quot;Security.&quot;As if I&#x27;m in the government or something. Why can&#x27;t the people who need military level security get their own platform? Shouldn&#x27;t they just have that already?

I would caution the decision makers on this. The line between a secure device and a useless toy is perforated and hard to see.

The amount of open stuff that was migrated into the Play Services closed source blob over the years just keeps growing.

I&#x27;m not sure what you&#x27;re referring to, but I was talking about the whole permissions system where the user is a third class citizen. Device manufacturers are second class citizens (restricted by Google via CDD&#x2F;CTS) and the only true winner on that system is Google.Regarding some concrete examples - Google can deeply integrate Gemini, but a competitor can&#x27;t do this and users get no final say here either. Competitors are restricted by the permission system, Google is not restricted at all.While rooting can alleviate this to some extent, Play Integrity is there to make sure the user regrets that decision to break free..

There are some functionality limited to google play services, but it really is not too much in my opinion.

Android was never open. User apps are limited, only system apps can do X which means third party apps can&#x27;t compete with Google and this is not a coincidence.Let&#x27;s focus on making it possible to use really open Linux systems on smartphones.

I think you&#x27;ve omitted the next section, which seems more relevant. It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text. Seems reasonable?

Even restricting the mitigation to &quot;students and hobbyists&quot; is bad.I should have the right to have parents, friends or anyone use a &quot;free&quot; store that is not under control of Google if the user and app developer wish so. But also, somehow there should be something done to avoid the monopoly forcing to use the Google services. Like major institutions like bank, gov and co being forced to provide alternatives like a webapp when they provide app tied to the Google play store.

&gt; We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.In classic Google fashion, they hear the complaint, pretend that it&#x27;s about something else, and give a half baked solution to that different problem that was not the actual issue. Any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.

The problem with this mentality is that you&#x27;re not proposing a solution that solves the problem Google and Apple are trying to solve (or are at least stating they are). Rather than just vent about ideals, showing up to the table and listening to the requirements of all stakeholders (even if they differ from yours) will lead to a more productive result. I would not listen to your concerns if you didn&#x27;t listen to mine.

&gt; shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists.Even that is a step too far in the wrong direction. Doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s free, or whatever, simply requiring an account at all to create and run software on your own device (or make it available to others) is wrong.There exists no freedom when you are required to verify your identity, or even just provide any personal information whatsoever, to a company to run software on your device that you own.

&gt; We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren&#x27;t tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands.Perhaps this, when shipped, will pave the way for sane regulation of Apple’s practices along these lines, too.

For reference, [0] was discussed here: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45908938">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45908938</a>

Addressed in the OP&gt; We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth, and having journalists just copy&#x2F;paste Google posts serves no one.&gt; But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issue… As time marches on people were left with the impression that everything was done, fixed, Google “wasn’t evil” after all, this time, yay!

&gt; This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.How can they count the number of devices you install the app on without being the ones to give a permission to install it?They took nothing back, they are still putting in place the requirement that Google gives permission to install apps on your phone. They are misleading us about it too which is also terrible.

Just to put out what Google actually said in their blog post [0]:&gt; We appreciate the community&#x27;s engagement and have heard the early feedback – specifically from students and hobbyists who need an accessible path to learn, and from power users who are more comfortable with security risks. We are making changes to address the needs of both groups.&gt; We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.&gt; Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn&#x27;t verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren&#x27;t tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months.It is also true that they have not updated their developer documentation site and still assert that developer verification will be &quot;required&quot; in September 2026 [1]. Which might be true by some nonsensical definition of &quot;required&quot; if installing unverified apps requires an &quot;advanced flow&quot;, but let&#x27;s not give too much benefit of the doubt here.0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;11&#x2F;android-developer-verification-early.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android-developers.googleblog.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;11&#x2F;android-de...</a>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.android.com&#x2F;developer-verification</a>

GrapheneOS is great. But that currently means you have to buy a phone from Google to work around Google looking down Android.

Great idea, I just did the same. I encourage other EU citizens to do the same. Keeping at least one of the two major mobile ecosystems open is important.(And install GrapheneOS, the more successful open Android becomes, the better.)

Done! I wrote up both my concerns about this and how it affects app&#x2F;app-store market competition, and how limitations like Play Integrity encourage apps to block usage on non-Google approved devices as well, since that&#x27;s anti-competitive within the mobile device &amp; OS market (blocking GrapheneOS, Waydroid, etc).Supporting free competition with and within the Android market is in theory what these teams are all about so hopefully with enough voices they&#x27;ll push harder on it. I&#x27;d love to see a shift here that makes non-Google&#x2F;Apple-controlled mobile a possible option (even if it&#x27;s a Linux-on-desktop-style niche for the foreseeable future)

I contacted the EU DMA team about my concerns and got a real reply within 24 hours. Not just an automated message, it looked like a real human read my message and wrote a reply. I&#x27;d urge other EU citizens to do the same.

There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company. And before you say something along the lines of, &quot;But they don&#x27;t need to compete, they just need to be good enough&quot;, that still requires business to put their apps on some open source app store and make them compatible with the open source OS, and there is close to zero incentive for them to do so.

If they close things up with no alternative, the free open source software will likely start to catch up. it will take a few years though. This could be a blessing in disguise.

It&#x27;s also heavily influenced by businesses. Most employers will happily hand you an Apple or Android phone for work, but I don&#x27;t think there is a single company out there that would dare to hand normal people an Ubuntu Touch based phone.

What country does this &quot;we&quot; that you speak of live in? In the US there hasn&#x27;t been any antitrust enforcement for 30 years (really more like 50 years, but I&#x27;m being generous), Obama appointed a crop of judges that don&#x27;t even believe in antitrust as a concept, and Congress doesn&#x27;t do anything that hasn&#x27;t been paid for by a donor any more.I haven&#x27;t heard about any other countries doing any better, either. Their systems were even cheaper to subvert.

We (people who live in a country&#x2F;confederacy with working antitrust laws) have power to keep large companies from anticompetitive practices such as this one.

A Precursor costs about 1000$ and only does cryptography, not Flappy Bird. Most of these supposedly open alternatives make no economic sense.

&gt; Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.My smartphone runs an FSF-endorsed OS, PureOS. This is reality. It&#x27;s not open hardware, but it&#x27;s a long way from Android in the right direction. You can also get a Precursor, which is open hardware.

We (&quot;you&quot;) have no power to keep android open. Unfortunately it is in the hands of a company that is building it for profit, in a way or the other.It&#x27;s been our choice to drink this glass of wishful thinking while giving that company a solid dominant position in the market.We (&quot;you&quot;) can only make choices that will overturn that trend.Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.

Half, or more, of the world thinks exactly the same in regards to the US

Meanwhile the NSA and Mossad can see you fapping on your phone and scan your face in real time and you&#x27;re implicitly fine with itThis is what lack of options does to a MF

Why? If I had to choose, I&#x27;d much rather use a phone controlled by a jurisdiction in which I don&#x27;t live or have any business.

I would rather put my phone in the microwave than run Chinese Communist Party OS.

Not sure if you have been following the LLM space or even the emulator handhelds space, but Chinese companies have been doing great with putting out open source software lately.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arena.ai&#x2F;leaderboard&#x2F;text?license=open-source" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arena.ai&#x2F;leaderboard&#x2F;text?license=open-source</a>

The irony is that software coming from China is a lot more open than western software. Biggest examples are huggingface models mostly coming from Chinese institutions. Its also strategicaly wise for China to go this path.

Not a chance. A fork that is under China&#x27;s control, maybe, but not an &quot;open&quot; fork. They don&#x27;t even pretend to have that as a value.You may theoretically find it advantageous to use such a system anyhow. To a first-order approximation, the danger a government poses to you is proportional to its proximity to you. (In the interests of fairness, I will point out, so are the benefits a government may offer to you. In this case it just happens to be the dangers we are discussing.) Using the stack of a government based many thousands of miles&#x2F;kilometers away from you may solve a problem for you, if you judge they are much less likely to use it against you than your local government.But China certainly won&#x27;t put out an &quot;open&quot; anything.

Pinephone is tragic, bought a bunch of Pine64&#x27;s devices (PP, PPP, PB, PBuds, arm tablet, eInk tablet) but old tech, missing drivers, can&#x27;t blame em no money no drivers... Still the community on Discord is great&#x2F;helpful people.

That&#x27;d be great but I&#x27;m not feeling like the Chinese market is too worried about open development. I got a Huawei Watch 5 as a gift and I liked it enough to try to develop my own apps (their app store is a wasteland) but to my surprise Harmony OS is not Android compatible (just Android based somehow). The watch&#x27;s developer mode is useless. Trying to register a developer account is almost impossible and it seems they only allow chinese nationals and there&#x27;s no plan to open registration. I couldn&#x27;t even download their custom IDE (something like Android Studio) without an account.Maybe it&#x27;s just my experience.

As far as I know, China forbids open bootloaders on its territory so it&#x27;s not where you&#x27;ll see any open ecosystem.Not Google controlled for sure but also not open.

I don’t think China will do that at all. They’ll move to HarmonyOS.

As of version 5, HarmonyOS doesn&#x27;t have the Android compatibility layer.  There are emulators that allow APKs to run, but they&#x27;re a bit clunky.

Maybe a shift to Huaweis HarmonyOS with its android compatibility layer or SailfishOS if they play their cards right.As far as HarmonyOS i dont see many uptakes outside strict US free requirements as the other OEMs are lazy and also dont want to be locked into a competitor.SailfishOS looks like its your time to faceplant once more , by not having a proper stratergy on monetizing on the many missteps from the current monopoly.I thonk at this point they need a leadership&#x2F;biz stratergy overhaul - the tech is nice and polished, user demand is off the charts for an alternative . And they are just .. missing. Not even in th e conversation.

&gt; China will likely step in and offer a fork that&#x27;s compatible with open ecosystems not under the direct control of the us state department.Where you been? They already had Huawei get kickbanned by Google and made their own OS (it&#x27;s not more open): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HarmonyOS" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;HarmonyOS</a>

Competition needs to come from somewhere due to lack of antitrust enforcement in the US. If not China then hopefully elsewhere.The US system is dying from lack of competition.

&gt; a &quot;China bad&quot; crowdGovernment bad. Big government worse.

This isnt going to be a popular post because the HN crowd is very much a &quot;China bad&quot; crowd but I hypothesize China will likely step in and offer a fork that&#x27;s compatible with open ecosystems not under the direct control of the us state department. This might be in the form of commits and investment in fdroid and pinephone, or a tiktok like alternative to the wests walled garden.Edit: this will likely exist &quot;uncensored&quot; in other markets but conform to the PRCs standards and practices domestically, similarly to how tiktok operated prior to selling a version specifically taylored to US censorship and propaganda.

The Control Society is way lamer than I could have imagined.  Deleuze!  I demand a refund!

&gt;F-Droid Basic
Great, now they can spread themselves even thinner. Just revert the entire trash rewrite from years ago. Problem solved

They have the incentive to never chose this.If we force it upon them by begging politicians, corporations still have the incentive to find a way to remove it or circumvent it.Youre playing the cat and mouse game because you&#x27;ve been taught that solving it is too extreme (thats not a coincidence).We dont need to endlessly fight a whole class of people, capitalists, for them not to use the things we require against us. Only socialism can solve that.

&gt; Aren&#x27;t the politicians or their appointed bureaucrats who&#x27;d be making all the decisions if these needs were government owned?Well that would be true under a capitalist government.&gt; Why would state control lead to less policing?Its not just &quot;the state runs it&quot;, its &quot;we actively become the state&quot;.Collective ownership through peoples councils, peoples courts with a world view that keeps it all open: socialism.The world view of not allowing individual ownership over collective goods, the world view of socialism, is the life line of the movement. The actual practice of daily democracy, of running production and of deciding social functions is everyones responsibility and it should not be left to what has become a professional class of liars.Public office members, which should only exist where absolutely necessary, should be locals and serve as messengers with 0 decision making power. All power should be in the local councils. We can mathematically implement this today (0 knowledge proofs).Every single book on socialism is on theory and practices of acheiving this. Thats what the &quot;dictatorship of the proletariat is&quot;, the dictatorship of working people, collectively.&gt; What incentive structure would lead to innovation without a profit motive, when even the modern communist world relies on capital markets?We&#x27;ve been innovating for hundreds of thousands of years before capitalism. You dont need to generate money to innovate, the innovation itself is the driver, AKA a better life. No need to lock and limit production behind the attaining of profits of those who lead it.

Aren&#x27;t the politicians or their appointed bureaucrats who&#x27;d be making all the decisions if these needs were government owned? Why would state control lead to less policing? What incentive structure would lead to innovation without a profit motive, when even the modern communist world relies on capital markets?(these are honest questions and not &quot;gotcha&quot;)

Capitalism is the privatization of human needs. As long as these tech platforms are owned privately they will be used to police and make money.This view NEEDS to be central to the tech freedom rhetoric, else the whole movement is literally just begging politicians and hoping corporations do the right thing... useless.

Discussed here four months ago: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45742488">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=45742488</a>

The link is to the f-droid blog. The official &quot;Keep Android Open&quot; site is at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keepandroidopen.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;keepandroidopen.org&#x2F;</a>, and contains good information on how you can contribute by contacting regulators.

You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policySo at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and&#x2F;or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same paceI couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social

The enforcement mechanism is in Google Play Services, not AOSP. To laypeople the difference doesn&#x27;t matter but to folks looking for alternatives it does, so the discussion is often muddied and imprecise. This is like when YouTube removed public dislike counts and it turned into &quot;they&#x27;re removing the dislike button!&quot;

The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena&#x27;s e&#x2F;OS&#x2F; (which I&#x27;m personally using).I don&#x27;t think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social&#x2F;116103732808311135" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mastodon.social&#x2F;@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social&#x2F;116103...</a>

I switched back to Android in large part for KDE Connect. You can get continuity esque features that work with any desktop operating system. I also get to use real Firefox instead of a Safari wrapper. I still use as few Google services as possible, pretty much just Maps.

At this point, I wouldn&#x27;t recommend Android other than enjoying the much steeper discount with the headset. For me, the only thing that is keeping me on Android is easier access to commas on the keyboard.

But this thread is about the option to install apps on your device regardless of OS vendor approval, and that&#x27;s not possible either with iOS nor is iOS open source. And that&#x27;s what this is all about. If you don&#x27;t care about open-source and user freedom, then this change wouldn&#x27;t matter to you anyway.

&gt; But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android?How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.I&#x27;m not even talking about its &quot;walled concentration camp&quot; app model.

you&#x27;re a really vanilla user then.wake me up when there&#x27;s an adblocker on an iphone.

I love the Java&#x2F;Kotlin userspace, even if it is Android Java flavour, and the our way or the highway attitude to C and C++ code, instead of yet another UNIX clone with some kind of X Windows into the phone.In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.I can afford iPhones, but won&#x27;t buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.However I also support their Swift&#x2F;Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don&#x27;t see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.

As someone who hates both android and iOS but currently has to use iOS, I definitely hate it more. It lacks so many things one can take for granted on android. Even a usable keyboard is missing from iOS.

Who could Android be possibly recommended to at this point?I know iPhones aren&#x27;t affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the &quot;customization&quot; things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don&#x27;t care about.I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow&#x2F;habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I&#x27;ve seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development&#x2F;distribution environment is gone, etc.If people can&#x27;t even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they&#x27;re really just a shitty iOS knockoff.

For me as a desktop linux poweruser, I find this potential transition pretty intimidating, I&#x27;ve never flashed a phone with a custom rom let alone switch to a completely different OS, and I am not sure if the phone can even be reset to its original OS, if things go south.

Expecting Google to give up control of one of the only alternative operating systems is right up there with believing in the tooth fairy.What you&#x27;re saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.

&gt; If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones...It won&#x27;t.

Until Android is crippled it will continue to take resources away from Linux Phone development and companies that will launch phones for it

The limitation of linux phones is hardware. I have been watching the progress of postmarketOS on the fairphone 4, and looks promising.

Even if you have linux, there are still third parties that have control over your hardware. Even if you&#x27;re using graphenos, you can&#x27;t block the sim or the cellular radio stack, and likely other modules on the SoC, from at-will access to every sensor on the device. You can at least protect your files, unless there&#x27;s a mitm or other vector that graphenos can&#x27;t cope with. And at worst, they can simply clone all your encrypted bits and wait on Moore&#x27;s law or sufficient cubits to go back and crack the copy, on the off chance there&#x27;s anything they want with your data in the first place.

It won&#x27;t though, because there&#x27;s a ecosystem of banking&#x2F;insurance&#x2F;whatever apps that have bought into the android&#x2F;iphone lockdown mindsete that people will simply be locked out of. Open alternatives can grow when there is a viable means of slow growth, and cutting off the oxygen to such things is the implicit intent.

Have a look at this post<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46723594">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46723594</a> from Emre @emrekosmazIt is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11Actual link 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nexphone.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-every-computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nexphone.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...</a>

There&#x27;s no point. Remote attestation means your device needs to be corporate owned to be trusted. Even if you had your own linux phone, it wouldn&#x27;t be able to interface with institutions such as banks and governments. They trust Google&#x27;s keys, not yours. This doesn&#x27;t quite end free computing, it just kills it for normal people and ostracizes us hackers who insist on owning our systems.

But there is a lot of resources put into the android ecosystem already. Even open source apps like anki, syncthing etc

Adoption would mean that orgs like the European Payment Initiative behind Wero would adopt Linux phones even other AOSP ROMs. Not seeing that. Banks and streaming platforms that require DRM are keeping most (non-activist type) users locked in.

It may push a minority of users who really care about open source to Linux phones. I expect the majority of users will grumble but cave and re-adopt mainstream Android or Apple.

If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones, then this will end up being a good thing, and the greatest favor that Google could do for the open source community.Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years.)

I.. don&#x27;t think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don&#x27;t think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability
- there is a push on its way to revamp phones into &#x27;what comes next&#x27; -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace )
- small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks
- anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption

Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.

I understand why mobile&#x2F;tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that&#x27;s no longer needed.However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.I hope the EU&#x2F;US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.

&gt; death of Androiddeath of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.

This is one of the most naive things I see people repeat.The reality is that we&#x27;re lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that&#x27;s mostly-good, they&#x27;ll finally get something that&#x27;s even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else&#x27;s).In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html&#x2F;css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.If only there weren&#x27;t Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else&#x27;s.

Personally I&#x27;m excited about the death of Android, now resources can be put toward mainstreaming and maturing the Linux Phone ecosystemHopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone

Yes it is, and no they didn&#x27;t. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I&#x27;m not clear on whether any actually exist right now.

How specific is the law? What if side loading requires a &quot;trusted&quot; signed certificate where trusted means from Google Play?Not even playing devil&#x27;s advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.

The kind of &quot;side-loading&quot; of notarized apps outside the manufacturer&#x27;s app store that Apple allows in the EU is exactly what Google proposed to do for all its Android builds. We don&#x27;t want that.

If a lawsuit tackles this problem in the EU, will we finally also see somebody go after MS for their obnoxious code signing certificates?While MS code signing certs are more circumventable for power-users than Android&#x27;s new approved developer program, their pricing is far more prohibitive for independent OSS developers and hobbyists, costing hundreds of USD per year.

Good thing restricting side-loading isn&#x27;t legal in the European Union! Not a problem here. Apple had to enable side-loading on their EU-based phones and so will Google if they restrict it.

I like it, because more and more people see Google as what it is: a ruthless, selfish and extremely greedy mega-mega-corporation. The less we depend on it the better.

You&#x27;ll miss having a keyboard that works

I did this last year. Reluctantly. And using iOS still hurts. But it’s better than that Google crap.I developed my own Android ROMs from 2009-2011, complete with my own tuned kernel. I ran the local Android developers MeetUp group and evangelised Android development. When Honeycomb launched I helped OEMs test their beta firmware. For free.But as Google has become certified Evil, the direction of Android has been very clear. In practice I honestly can’t say it’s now any more open than iOS. Except it has a lot more avenues for Google to mine your data to sell ads. And the quality of third party apps on it is decidedly worse.I thought long and hard about getting a Linux phone. But I need a good camera on my phone to take random snaps of kids&#x2F;pets&#x2F;etc. And the Linux phones just aren’t there.I hate the shitty duopoly we have ended up with. But I now realise that the openness of x86 and pc as platform really was an accident of history.

The only reason I was sticking to Android for years is this. And I think there is no moat for Android. I would rather switch to iOS if both platforms are same restrictive.

&gt;The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena&#x27;s e&#x2F;OS&#x2F; (which I&#x27;m personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don&#x27;t see why they would not remove the verification and that&#x27;s an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.

Good news: You (as a community) can now finally wake up from your dreams and get some things right!It&#x27;s really a shame that you always wait until you really get forced. Particularly in situations when every individual&#x27;s inability has consequences for the others as well. I really gave up all ideas of a better world. With this community, the best you can hope is that the decay will be slow.So everyone who would describe himself&#x2F;herself as a FOSS enthusiast, or at least a friend of a somewhat open system where the user has some actual rights beyond sole consumption, put some pressure towards having actually de-Googled systems. A system that mostly comes from Google, would not fit my definition of that term at all! Even if they removed some parts of it. It&#x27;s an euphemism. And it&#x27;s dangerous because you constantly get trapped by these euphemisms. Ever. Single. F&#x27;ing. Time.

There is an implicit shame in disgrace but faceless entities have no shame. They&#x27;ll just put out another press release written in corporate newspeak by an LLM and move on withe the plans anyway. This is standard Google behaviour. They do it with Chrome, they do it with Android, they&#x27;ll keep doing it with all their captive markets. I fear that in practice even having an &quot;advanced flow&quot; will make little difference as some applications will refuse to work if you have it enabled anyway (in the same vein if debugging is enabled, for example).Nothing about Android is open except the absolutely minimum amount of linux kernel that&#x27;s required to boot the thing. Then it&#x27;s blobs and restrictions all the way to the screen.

There&#x27;s strong political backing for it now.

Online anonymity makes it harder for TPTB to punish dissidents.

I think people in power have realized the impact of misinformation campaigns. And to be fair, western countries have proved to have the resilience of a wet paper bag against foreign influence and private interests.I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here. A move back to the early 2000s internet would be the ideal middle ground, which requires separating social stuff from informational stuff, and both from engagement algorithms. I have no idea how we’re supposed to put that genie back in the bottle.And to be clear I’m not saying this as vouching for the current push, I hate it as well.

Before we had mainly one excuse: to protect the kidsLater we got a new one: to reveal Russian shills&#x2F;propaganda botsNow we also have: to filter out AI slopAny problem the internet experiences will eventually become an excuse to eliminate online anonymity.

Why does there seem to be a growing push to tie real-world identity to nearly everything we do online? The justification is almost always &quot;safety&quot;. I know this trend has been developing for years, but over the past couple of years it feels like it&#x27;s accelerated globally.

It is a disgrace how Google has managed this situation.To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an &quot;advanced flow&quot; for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe.But this promised feature hasn&#x27;t appeared in any Android 16 or 17 betas. Google is quietly proceeding with the original lockdown.The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena&#x27;s e&#x2F;OS&#x2F; (which I&#x27;m personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.

&gt; We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truthYou must find truth. Lies will find you.

There is no such thing as non-Google Android. At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.It&#x27;s the same as the situation with Chrome&#x2F;Chromium. There are a million &quot;de-Googled&quot;&#x2F;&quot;privacy focused&quot; alternatives to Chrome all using the same engine, and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.

Get a large phone vendor to get a flagship phone with Graphene or so on the market. Otherwise nothing will happen. Even starting with the smaller ones like Blackview would do something. But almost no one will do that because users are said to want android; like my parents care... But they will care of course when their banking app stops working... That is the real issue imho.

A hard fork is not needed. Non-Google Android do not have to enforce this requirement. It&#x27;s more important to get as many people on alternatives like GrapheneOS as possible. And fund them by donating to them. If every ~0.5 million GrapheneOS users donated 10 Euro per month, they would be very well-funded.

Who else is going to maintain and develop it? It&#x27;s the same issue as with Chrome, even if you force Google to give it to some other company, they&#x27;re all just as bad. And it&#x27;s too big and too costly to maintain for anyone else but tech giants.The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source developers. And good luck with that.

Under what law is that a legal or ethical thing to do? Why not suggest ios be taken away from Apple as well and windows from Microsoft?

The answer has to come from anti trust legislation. Android is too big for Google to control.

Google&#x27;s own phones do not have a locked booloader. You can buy a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it in like 10 minutes. But basically no one does this, because no matter what people say in online forums they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.

Yeah, that&#x27;s the biggest issue. And it all originally stemed from phone carriers wanting to lock customers into their services.We need some pro-consumer regulations on hardware which mandate open platforms. Fat chance of that happening, though, as the likes of both the EU and US want these locked down systems so they put in mandatory backdoors.

People give a lot of flack to the EU, but this is the sort of thing they would regulate.

Even if locked bootloaders weren&#x27;t a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of &quot;security alert&quot; and &quot;device not supported&quot;. Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.

Or the fact that you need device drivers for every piece of hardware in a phone.

People will keep using the OS their phone comes with and that would be Google&#x27;s Android. It&#x27;s worse than with Windows PCs and Windows to be honest because phones have a locked bootloader.

Yep, exactly why I&#x27;ve always supported the adoption of GPLv3. What point is there to FOSS if you cant use it?

A hard fork doesn&#x27;t matter when the vast majority of phones have a locked bootloader.

The gigantic task of maintaining and developing a mobile OS that needs to retain compatibility with AOSP&#x2F;GPS anyway to tap into the huge amount of applications that are available?It will cost a lot of money and as long as Google is still doing regular AOSP code drops, what&#x27;s the point?

The same reason nobody is doing a hard fork of Chromium.

Yeah. It is [1]. Surprisingly, Android Studio is open source too [2].[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android.googlesource.com&#x2F;platform&#x2F;sdk&#x2F;+&#x2F;refs&#x2F;heads&#x2F;main" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android.googlesource.com&#x2F;platform&#x2F;sdk&#x2F;+&#x2F;refs&#x2F;heads&#x2F;m...</a>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android.googlesource.com&#x2F;platform&#x2F;tools&#x2F;base&#x2F;+&#x2F;studio-master-dev&#x2F;source.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;android.googlesource.com&#x2F;platform&#x2F;tools&#x2F;base&#x2F;+&#x2F;studi...</a>

What about the Android SDK? I don&#x27;t think that this is open source, is it? As a developer, when you download an Android SDK you have accept a licence that is not open source, right?

Google&#x27;s moat with Android is the same as it&#x27;s moat with Chrome: complexity. There are very few entities that could fork Android.

The fundamental problem is that we are relying on the good graces of Google to keep Android open, despite the fact that it often runs run contrary to their goals as a $4T for-profit behemoth. This may have worked in the past, but the &quot;don&#x27;t be evil&quot; days are very far behind us.I don&#x27;t see a real future for Andrioid as an open platform unless the community comes together and does a hard fork. Google can continue to develop their version and go the Apple way (which, funny enough, no one has a problem with). Development of AOSP can be controlled by a software foundation, like tons of other successful projects.

The lesson? Only discuss illegal activity in auto-delete Slack channels

Google lost because they have all the emails colluding to prevent competition.If Google had not done that, they wouldn&#x27;t have lost.

Apple has not competitors and it is not a monopoly? This is exactly the definition of monopoly.

The judge told Google that Apple is not anti-competitive because Apple has no competitors on it&#x27;s platform (this all stemming from the Epic lawsuits).Google listened.Blame the judge for one of the worst legal calls in recent history. Google is a monopoly and Apple is not. Simple fix for Google...

What people forget is that the real monopoly is in how the AOSP hardware OEM contract is written....Remember how hard Amazon had it to attempt an Android fork?I was due to OEM SOC access being locked out due to those contracts....Any open source mobile OS attempting to complete with AOSP needs access to mobile OEM soc providers not touched by AOSP contracts and currently that is somewhat hard.

I love postmarketos, but there is not even one &quot;Main&quot; phone with all of the hardware feature supported.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.postmarketos.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Devices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.postmarketos.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Devices</a>Fairphone 4 looks close, hopefully fairphone 4 support will continue to improve at this rate. Pinephone is another close one, but underpowered hardware and camera support kills it.I am not even that intensive of a phone user. but there is no way I could daily drive pmOS.

I wish I could. There are many proprietary apps for banks and governments, which are definitely not available for Linux based phones. Maybe I can run them through waydroid though, I don&#x27;t want to risk my fully working Pixel to try it out.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postmarketos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;postmarketos.org&#x2F;</a>It&#x27;s time to say goodbye.

You keep hoping things won&#x27;t get too bad, but they will. You just keep delaying the inevitable. So it&#x27;s better to switch now to get the initial hurdles of such a big change over with as soon as possible. It&#x27;s not easy, getting used to completely strange behaviours and new things in general. Abandoning what worked for you for years for something completely foreign. You have to force yourself to withstand the first few days or week(s), but then it becomes the new normal and you&#x27;ll be fine.Personally, I am still on W10 and and delaying the move, so i&#x27;m not holier than thou. It&#x27;s tough. But I also am a programmer&#x2F;power user and am on my PC 24&#x2F;7, sort of, so this disruption must be timed properly for me to make the move, which is not necessarily the case for most people&#x2F;average users.Phone on the other hand, as long as it works and does not limit me, I have no need to use different ROM, it&#x27;s more of a want. But i do not see me doing anything until the system stops being supported or it breaks or something else. So it depends on how you use it.

What is the advantage of moving sooner vs. moving later when rough spots have been smoothed over?

On desktop, unknown OS cannot be anything else but Linux, so that&#x27;s 20% altogether(16%+4%). But that does not matter. The shift has started last year when W10 support ended and due to how bad W11 is and it is just getting stronger and stronger. Watch increase in YT videos about moving from Windows to Linux, or social networks in general. You cannot miss it. I&#x27;ve been on windows since 95, before that DOS. So that is three decades of being a loyal customer, so to speak. Even though I tried Linux in the past, Windows just works so I had no reason to switch.With W11, that is not the case. Therefore, it becomes inevitable. Worth mentioning is that companies, governments and whole countries are ditching Microsoft altogether - for various reasons(some are geopolitical, due to sanctions and tariffs, others are technical).Lenovo, Dell and HP are slowly ditching W11 as well in favour of linux. If you look up definitions of malware and spyware, windows 11 falls into both of them. It&#x27;s that bad. So again, I&#x27;m not a linux fanboy by any stretch of imagination, but the writing is not just on the wall, we&#x27;ve passed the point of no return. Or rather, Microsoft has.Now that linux supports 95% of games, there is little holding people back as gaming was always the biggest hurdle when it came to linux. And Adobe, too, is no longer what keeps people stuck on Windows - either because they ditched it due to their horrible pricing practices, or because there are now solid alternatives.Of course many people will switch to mac as well. But windows in general, i think, is done. It had a good run for few decades, but they dropped the ball so hard that there is no going back or fixing it with w12.

I wouldn&#x27;t hold my breath:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;windows-11-has-hit-1-billion-users-just-a-hair-faster-than-windows-10-did&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;windows-11-has-hit-1...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;os-market-share&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gs.statcounter.com&#x2F;os-market-share&#x2F;</a>

Just like Microsoft screwed up Windows, Google will screw up Android and people will move to Linux on PCs and some open version of Android, or Harmony, or whatever new mobile system comes up, on their phones.Nothing lasts for ever. The sooner you make the switch, the better off you will be.

Amusingly, if Microsfot didn&#x27;t have a such an awful reputation ( both recent and old ), their newly announced phones could have actually been a viable competitor.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;</a>
.html<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;twif.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;twif.html</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;twif.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;2026&#x2F;02&#x2F;20&#x2F;twif.html</a>

But they did. That was the announcement that they would still allow sideloading. If you are still afraid then that&#x27;s kind of on you. Seems silly to expect Google to put out info about enabling sideloading for a system they haven&#x27;t even released yet. It could very well be in there day 1. Nobody knows.

Google made the first move with their initial plan to lock it down, so the onus is on Google to calm the fears they caused if they don&#x27;t want people to distrust them.

&gt;But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issueA bit ironic to not believe Google is doing this. The same questions have same answers when asked about when Google is locking down side loading. A bit self-serving to pick and choose which things you want to believe are happening.

Should device manufacturers be worried about this direction? Could they eventually be locked out too?

What would it take for Linux phones to gain the ability to run Android apps?

I question whether an OS that has always been controlled by Google has ever been open.Sure parts of it were, but Google has always remained in control of Android. Anyone who expected that to change (in favor of more openness) hasn&#x27;t been paying attention to the actions of tech companies for the past several decades.

This is where I wish someone like MKBHD and others with big Android followings would speak up and say they will both blast this practice and not review any new Android phones&#x2F;(Google) apps unless there&#x27;s a full walk-back of this position.

The relative openness is the reason I gravitated towards Android and Google. I&#x27;ve never really taken advantage of it, but it&#x27;s nice knowing it&#x27;s there and that my phone (a Google Pixel) is something I have more control over than with other vendors.

The biggest surprise I had in attempting to distribute my first Android app is how difficult it is to get beta-testers through the &quot;standard&quot; channels. It requires a 1 week review and 25 beta-users invited by email addressesIn contrast, Apple has a ~48 hour turnaround for reviews before you can upload to TestFlight and distribute a beta with a linkNot sure if I am in some &quot;trusted developer&quot; cohort on iOS but not Android - but the difference was enough for me to stop trying on Android

Since smartphone apps are often times required to do banking or identifying yourself now and there&#x27;s tons of special apps in order to use appliances, and by that I mean really the only way to use modern appliances is by a smartphone app, emulating an Android environment on a laptop or PC with a bluetooth dongle is essential if you want to leave that smartphone era behind you for good, but still be able to function in this society.

Crazy idea: when companies change their product, they have to change the name.Do you ever feel like the same food item doesn&#x27;t taste the same it did 10 years ago? Maybe it&#x27;s your memory being faulty or maybe the company got new management which decided to cut costs while keeping prices, extract the differential value from customer inertia and move on when the product stops being profitable.Android is the same. Certain freedoms were a part of the offering - a part of the brand name. They no longer are. Not only should lose their trademark[0], they should be legally forced to change the name.[0]: The purpose of which is to identify genuine product from counterfeits - in this case, the counterfeit just happens to be by the same company which released the original product.

The number one problem is locked hardware

I remember not long ago arguing that having Chromium become a monopoly was a bad thing, as it would mean Google could totally twist the web standard in something much more closed. I think this is a prime example.

90% of apps are just websites with a wrapper UI.

I mostly agree with your points.&gt; &gt; That users won&#x27;t be able to install what they want&gt; No, sideloading will still work, but it won&#x27;t work if the APK isn&#x27;t signed by someone in the Google developer registry.So the user can&#x27;t install what they want. They can only install stuff signed by developers Google has &quot;approved&quot;.Yes, in the happy situation this is everything except for developers that Google has revoked. But technically it is only approved developers.

There&#x27;s a lot of misinformation here.&gt; I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an appNo, non-Play stores will still work, but developers will need to register a developer account with Google that is tied to some real identity. They already need to do this to distribute through the Play store, but now it&#x27;ll apply regardless.This is to make it harder for scam apps to churn app signatures. Kind of like requiring code-signing, but with only one CA.&gt; That users won&#x27;t be able to install what they wantNo, sideloading will still work, but it won&#x27;t work if the APK isn&#x27;t signed by someone in the Google developer registry.&gt; and that they would need a google account to install appsNope.&gt; That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.They don&#x27;t need to distribute through Google, but they will need to be involved with Google and do identity verification.&gt; However, I&#x27;m also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something?You&#x27;re being misinformed. They won&#x27;t even need to strip the verification. The verification is only for certified Android -- OEMs that partner with Google. Custom ROMs and the OEMs that aren&#x27;t certified (Amazon, some Chinese manufacturers) won&#x27;t have verification.The target audience for verification and who would ever use a custom ROM has basically zero overlap.

Could anyone provide me some clarifications?If I understood correctly, to &quot;protect&quot; users, Google wants to control what is installed on Android phones. I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app, which in turn means:
- That users won&#x27;t be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps
- That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.
Obviously this is awful and would mean the end of F-droid and Aurora store etc.
However, I&#x27;m also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something? Why do people link this app verification thing with a possible closing of AOSP?Also, Mozilla was already saying it 10years ago with Firefox OS but... The web is the platform. 90% of the apps out there could be websites. We have all technologies needed for this including offline with service workers. And it works on every damn platform, even the most obscure OS has a web browser. Don&#x27;t want to be locked to an ecosystem? Just target the web!

it&#x27;s becoming ever more clear to me that i&#x27;ll have at least two devices: one running software i trust, one running software corporates trust, with a very narrow pipeline connecting the two, if it all. my demon-haunted device can stay offline in my bag and get hotspot&#x27;d in to my trustworthy device as necessary.not happy about it, but i don&#x27;t see a path forward that lets one participate in the wider ecosystem and maintain their own sovereignty and sanity.

Looks like I&#x27;m staying in my custom ROM lol

&gt; just force Google toHow exactly are you going to force Google to do something?

&gt; Imagine your ISP having total control over your desktop computer. Or killing a website, or program, because the ISP doesn&#x27;t like it.It&#x27;s not very hard to imagine? Most people don&#x27;t expect that level of control anymore; their desktop just updates with whatever corporate slopware is pushed out seasonally. Websites come-and-go. It&#x27;s not a hugely motivating rally-cry for average person.&gt; We need to kill Android. And from the ashes, make a new platform that works for us, and not for a corporation&#x27;s profits and anti-competition.Android is the best-working part of that equation. Microsoft supported Android apps on Windows Phone. Jolla supports Android apps on Sailfish OS. Linux supports Android apps in Waydroid. You don&#x27;t have to &quot;kill&quot; Android as a runtime or smartphone OS; just force Google to compete with 3rd party ROMs.

Reminds me of this scene from Andor:-----Luthen: Turning back will be impossible. You knew where this was going. You&#x27;ve always knew. Has anyone ever made a weapon that wasn&#x27;t used? The network has been built. It&#x27;s up. It grows or it dies. We&#x27;ve waited long enough.Mon: Do you realise what you&#x27;ve set in motion?Luthen: It was time for that as well.Mon: Palpatine won&#x27;t hestiate now.Luthen: Exactly. We need it. We need the fear. We need them to over-react.Mon: You can&#x27;t be serious!Luthen: The empire has been choking us so slowly we&#x27;re starting not to notice. The time has come to force their hand.Mon: People will suffer!Luthen: That&#x27;s the plan. You&#x27;re not angry with me. I&#x27;m just saying out loud what you already know. There will be no rules going forward. If you&#x27;re not willing to risk your conscious then surrender and be done with.---<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ao9ARb6dEfc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ao9ARb6dEfc</a>edited: formatting

It&#x27;s really a cultural disease to accept this. From my other comment:&gt; I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They[&#x27;ve come to] hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can&#x27;t fight Google alone; it&#x27;s pointless to resist.*minor edit in brackets

I want Google to lock down their platform. Hardcore locked down. So locked down you can&#x27;t do anything with it at all. Because people need motivation to do something hard.Android has been a bloated walled garden for years. It should have been like a PC w&#x2F;Windows or Linux: anyone should be able to make an app (any way they want), publish it, let anyone who wants to download it &amp; run it. But that was never the plan. The plan was to provide a moat to allow mobile telephone operators (&amp; Google) to dictate what users were allowed to do with their phones. Imagine your ISP having total control over your desktop computer. Or killing a website, or program, because the ISP doesn&#x27;t like it.It is insane that we, the people giving them the money and agency to do this, that we&#x27;ve allowed this to be the status quo. We need to do something about it. We need to kill Android. And from the ashes, make a new platform that works for us, and not for a corporation&#x27;s profits and anti-competition.

APKs were the only reason why I was using android in the first place

I&#x27;ve finally started de-googling and removing google from my life as much as I can. It&#x27;s difficult with how much of everything is soaked in Google. I&#x27;m sure other&#x27;s here have gotten much further, but everything you do to reduce their monopoly control helps.

Periodic reminder (note, originaly posted in 2013): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2018&#x2F;07&#x2F;googles-iron-grip-on...</a>At the risk of posting memes to HN: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgflip.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;akp488" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgflip.com&#x2F;i&#x2F;akp488</a>

The shift towards locked-down ecosystems is concerning for developers. Openness isn&#x27;t just about freedom; it&#x27;s about the longevity of the hardware we own. If we can&#x27;t side-load or audit, we&#x27;re just renting the device

Does this block something like Obtainium?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;dev.imranr.obtainium.fdroid&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;f-droid.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;dev.imranr.obtainium.fdroid&#x2F;</a>This is sad as there’s been a real resurgence of gaming devices (Ayn Thor&#x2F;Odin, Retroid pocket devices, Ayaneo, etc) moving to Android from Linux variants (Batocera, Arc, Garlic&#x2F;OnionOS).It’s sad but more of an incentive for folks to finally take Linux as a viable alternative, and build on efforts made by Valve with SteamOS.

If they go through with this I am switching to iPhone because there at least I am told up front and am tried less like the a product to be sold to advertisers.

Whats Andy Rubins take on this ? The original developer&#x2F;contributor to android os itself

Good luck, no bank will touch a non-Google blessed platform with a 10 ft pole.

You are overinflating how useful AI is. Moreover most FOSS people actually don&#x27;t want any AI written code unless the human driving it has done equivalent amount of work understanding and designing it from scratch.

Does the AI boom help with this? Can we donate enough token-budget for GrapheneOS to maintain a fully functional fork?

Maybe stupid question, we keep seeing &quot;LLM figures out math problem humans couldn&#x27;t, LLM finds security vulnerability by looking at hexdumps for 6 months straight. How hard or expensive would it be to let some LLMs loose on reverse engineering all the proprietary driver binary blobs?People mentioning forking Android is hard, how easy do LLMs make this?

Mobian and postmarketOS are more advanced and work more like GNU&#x2F;Linux.

So how is Ubuntu touch doing these days? I keep meaning to try it, but never get around to it!

I visited change.org to sign the petition for them, only to get spammed by far-right extremist propagandas supporting nazism like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;E6LMUcB" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;E6LMUcB</a>I regret giving my real name and e-mail address to that website now.

Never has evil yielded when you appeal to it.

We need viable Linux on phones now more than ever. I&#x27;ll keep using GrapheneOS in the meantime.

AI is not yet at the point where non-developers could use it to build useful apps. I&#x27;ve tried. It gave me a good start that saved me a ton of time setting things up but the result was buggy and had a lot of bad code, so I still had to read and understand it all and fix the issues.

How do Google and Apple plan to deal with the immense influx of personal apps that AI will help non developers build?Recently, I was thinking that AI might force Apple to open their devices, because if Apple’s competitor allows sideloading, then the creatives and builders most likely to build their own apps will migrate to the platform providing less friction to getting custom apps onto their device. But apparently THIS is the time that Google has chosen to start locking down their devices as well?!

Why doesn’t the market respond? If people don’t like Android, it seems like a market opportunity to make another OS. People love to complain about Apple and Google’s “monopoly,” but doesn’t that present an opportunity for someone to build their own thing and if enough people want it, they will be able to sell it?

As long as it will be pixel-exclusive, it will remain useless to the vast majority of android-capable phone users.

A good opportunity to donate[1] to the GrapheneOS[2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;donate" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;donate</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grapheneos.org&#x2F;</a>

Well yeah that&#x27;s the problem. The Google monopoly. Google and Apple are the only one out there, in the West at least. It&#x27;s a huge problem. We have given all the power to two giant corporations. Really the only institution which can compel a change is the state.

But Google doesn&#x27;t want you running their app and not their OS, this is the whole idea behind Android and their hardware in general :)

You have that. Run Chrome browser on Linux. We should be thankful we have Linux.

GrapheneOS is as close as you can get to something like this.

Yeah but what you just said is &quot;I don&#x27;t want to run Android&quot;, which, sure, you can do.

I want Google as an app, not OS. Hear me out. Imagine an open device where you can run Google as just another sandboxed app. Inside, they can exert all the control they want. My bank and government can force me to use Google.Then, at least I control my hardware and my OS.It&#x27;s just nasty to have your device and OS controlled by an antagonistic entity.I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can&#x27;t fight Google alone; it&#x27;s pointless to resist.