Installing any app I want outside the Play Store was the primary reason I decided to go with Android, despite most of the people I know using iPhones. If I can't do this anymore, I may as well switch and be able to use iMessage and FaceTime with them.
Android is losing a unique selling point. This will have an impact on what a techie may recommend to a non-techie in the future, because everything is beige now.
I have the feeling Google has given up on using nerds as beachheads. The market is saturated enough and they don't need us anymore to do grass roots spreading of their products. It's the same with Youtube. As long as there were enough people who were unencumbered by ads because of their ad block and kept spreading links, the importance of Youtube was growing. After market saturation that vehicle isn't necessary anymore and they can squeeze them out.
The lack of antitrust enforcement is a clown show.
We have no choice in the most important computing category in the world. It's a duopoly and they have everyone in straightjackets - consumers, companies, competitors, governments, ...
A huge percentage of the world's thoughts and economy flow through mobile. And two companies own it.
It is not just that. In my case , everyone around me are using iphone . I made the sacrifice to not easily connect with them and use android so that i have freedom ( to install, customise what ever).
Once that freedom aspect is taken away. There is no reason for me to make that sacrifice.
Until EU's cross compatibility between messaging apps is passed, we are forced to be in vendor lockin.
It’s utterly bizarre how BBM could have been the iMessage and WhatsApp and who knows what else. But rich out-of-touch people thinking exclusivity is a perk in a commodities market just shows how business savvy and wealth are in reality disconnected from eachother.
I glanced at Ubuntu Touch, but its device compatibility looked severely lacking (https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/).... I have old Pixel phones I could potentially try it out on, but the last Pixel phone that is officially supported is the 3a. So that is a bummer.
> I just switched to the iPhone with the new cycle, explicitly because of this news.
And guess what, sideloading has never been allowed on iPhones.
So you just went from bad to worse. The only rational option for tech-minded people nowadays is to buy a device that supports Lineage or Graphene (ironically Pixels are good for this) and to replace the stock OS.
Then you'd be rewarding the company that pioneered and normalized taking away these rights. The next rights you'll lose will probably originate on Apple again years before Google takes them away too.
You can still install apps outside the play store, but the developer does need to verify their signing information. Effectively this means that any app you install must have a paper trail to the originating developer, even if its not on the app store. On one hand, I can see the need for this to track down virus creators, but on the other, it provides Google transparency and control over side loaded app. It IS a concerning move, but currently this is far from 'killing' non-appstore apps for most of the market.
So let's pick a random example app that might be popular on F-Droid today. Oh, I dunno...newpipe.
Given that Google both owns Android/Google Play Store and YouTube: what do you think they would do with the developer information of someone who makes an app that skirts their ad-model for YouTube?
Google is following the same game plan we saw when they decided that the full version of uBlock Origin (the version that is still effective on YouTube) should no longer be allowed within their browser monopoly.
The fact that there was a temporary workaround didn't change the endgame.
It's just there to boil the frog more slowly and keep you from hopping out of the pot.
It's the same game plan Microsoft used to force users to use an online Microsoft account to log onto their local computer.
Temporary workarounds are not the same thing as publicly abandoning the policy.
From a quick glance at /r/GooglePlayDeveloper/ it looks like Google is just as interested in killing playstore apps! It seems that they only want to support the existing larger apps now. I think they are giving a clear message to developers that its not really worth developing for that platform anymore. I think we will all agree that the playstore needed a purge but they seem to be making it impossible for any new solo devs at this point.
It also makes it easy for google to blacklist a developer, if for example the trump administration don’t like them (the same way apple removing apps documenting ICE).
Pretty sure virus creators could just pick a real ID leaked by the "adult only logins" shenanigans, whereas legit app developers probably wouldn't want to commit identity fraud.
Yeah... no. This is normal with desktop computers. Let's stop handholding people. If I trust the source, I trust the domain... I want to be able to install app from its source.
Googles/Apples argument would have been much stronger if their stores managed to not allow scams/malware/bad apps to their store but this is not the case. They want to have the full control without having the full responsibility. It's just powergrab.
I think they’re just going to track down a random person in a random country who put their name down in exchange for a modest sum of money. That’s if there’s even a real person at the other end. Do you really think that malware creators will stumble on this?
This has to be about controlling apps that are inconvenient to Google. Those that are used to bypass Google’s control and hits their ad revenue or data collection efforts.
Switching to iPhone will make it even more obvious there is an unhealthy monopoly, so that's nice. If there's no good reason to choose Android, why not?
What we really need is a fair alternative to both these abuse platforms. Choosing an unfamiliar abuse over a familiar abuse isn't exactly the smartest move. The switch over to a free(dom) platform like plain Linux must happen even if we have to make some temporary sacrifices like the loss of mobile banking facilities. It can't be worse than using a feature phone, can it? The app ecosystem will eventually attain parity if the platform achieves popularity.
How will Google force Android users to "update" so sideloadinng can be prevented
Non-updated versions of Android running non-updated versions of sideloaded apps will not have the restriction
Another example of how not every "update" is for "security" and "updates" should be optional
The computer owner chooses one version of an operating system, e.g., "I chose Android because I can sideload any app", but by allowing automatic updates, without reviewing them first, the computer owner agrees to let the operating system vendor change the software remotely to anything the vendor chooses. The computer owner goes along with whatever the vendor decides, letting the vendor take them for a ride
If the operating system gets _worse_ in the opinion of the computer owner, if it fails to meet their needs, e.g., "sideloading", then that's too bad. The computer owner chose one version of Android, but by subscribing to "automatic updates" they effectively chose all future versions as well
This is why I prefer BSD UNIX-like operating system projects where I can choose to update or not to update. Unlike the hypothetical Android user, the project does not decide for me
HN replies may try to draw attention to "security" and away from "sideloading restriction". However there is no option to accept "security updates" while rejecting "sideloading restriction updates". According to the so-called "tech" companies that conduct data collection and surveillance as a "business model" through free, auto-updated software, every update, no matter what it contains, is deemed essential and critical for "security"
Online commentators seem to agree that the computer owner should have the choice to install or not install _any_ software outside the "app store", so-called "sideloading". Perhaps this freedom to choose whether to install or not install software should also apply to operating system "updates"
> How will Google force Android users to "update" so sideloadinng can be prevented
Google has the Google Play Services, which can be remotely updated via the Play Store, as has been done for the COVID exposure notification system [0]. Google's Play Protect already hooks into the installation process and could be updated to enforce the signatures.
What happens if the computer owner disables Google Play Services along with the Play Store and keeps the phone offline
(Own experients conducted over the years make this a "rhetorical question" meaning I already know the answer)
Not every app requires Play Services and internet access
(Online commentators sometimes try to argue that all apps, even offlines ones, "require" Play Services otherwise they cannot be updated automatically, highlighting the significance of "automatic updates" in steering debates about Android. Own experiments show that many if not most apps work fine without Play Services and can be updated manually if desired)
Not every phone is used for banking or other "government services"
(For example, some owners have mulltiple phones. Some owners may have phones with older versions of mobile OS that may be used for experiments)
Not every computer owner is the same
(For example, most phone owners do not install any apps at all. Of those that do, most use "app stores", not so-called "sideloading")
HN replies are likely to invoke "security" as a retort to any suggestion of decision-making and control being placed with the computer owner
Automatic updates are pretty unrelated. Google can just release an updated version of google play services or a device verification API and everyone's banking/government ID apps will stop working until you manually update anyway. They have a pretty big stick to whack you over the head with if you don't update to the new version "for security"
Maybe it’s because I’m European but I’ve never understood what iMessage even is or what it offers above either sms or WhatsApp/signal. And I’ve used an iPhone for the past 15 years.
There are no good reasons left to use either platform - you're basically paying an arm and a leg to rent a device whose primary purpose is to usurp your attention and plunder your wallet at every possible opportunity.
Use and encourage your circle to use Signal, so you're not limited to any given platform, or the political or ideological whims of the gardenmeisters.
Google has gone full enshittified with this move, might as well move as far and as fast away from all the shit if you're technically capable, introduce whatever pressure you can to signal that there's a desperate need in the smartphone market for something clean and honest.
“There are no good reasons” really? One of my favorite things about iOS/ipados is the incredible selection of music creation apps. My iPad is loaded with synths, sequencers, and effects. AUM in particular is an amazing program for live performances mixing both software and hardware using a touch interface.
Many, but not all, of the programs I use on iPad are also available on Mac and Windows at much higher prices. That alone is reason enough to use a iPad. Most of these apps can be run on the least expensive iPad and/or older ones.
Like it or not, computing appliances have led to really good software markets. The “clean and honest” software markets are either much more expensive or don’t exist at all. The optimist in me is hoping that Android losing some freedom might lead to higher quality software and some actual competition to Apple.
Firefox with UBO is still a huge win. But Orion browser is making progress. At this point I just don’t see a reason to go android anymore. If I have to be part of a walled garden I may as well choose the nicer one.
You can still side-load signed apps. It's a similar limitation to macOS which won't let you run apps that Apple hasn't signed without command line or control panel shenanigans. Compared to iOS, Android still has the advantage of installing your own full browser (like Firefox) with full-fat ad blocking (uBlock Origin, not Lite). iOS is Safari-only right now though, in theory, some alternative engines may be available in Europe later.
With macOS you run "sudo spctl --master disable", and then you can run whatever you want without sending PII to Apple. Is that the case with the new Android stuff?
You can install full uBlock Origin in the Orion browser, on iOS. It also has decent built-in ad blocking (though uBlock Origin is still better).
I had been thinking for a long time to switch to Android (GrapheneOS, probably) when my current iPhone 13 dies, but this whole thing with "sideloading" on Android is making me reconsider. If I can't have the freedom I want either way, might as well get longer support, polished animation and better default privacy (though I still need to opt-out of a bunch of stuff).
Antitrust action is badly needed in this area. It is ridiculous that I need permission from my device manufacturer to install software on hardware I own. There is no viable alternative than to live in Apple and Google’s ecosystems. This duopoly cannot be allowed to keep this much control of the mobile platforms.
There needs to be a mandatory override for any lock down put in place by a manufacturer. I understand the need for security, but it should be illegal to prevent me from bypassing security if I decide to on my own device. Make it take multiple clicks and show me scary warnings, that's fine.
Technically Android still allows installation of anything if you use the debugging tool. Maybe that is where we have to draw the line, I'm not sure.
Aside from everyone pointing out that you can't do that on most phones, there's also the fact that installing your own OS will block you from using many apps that check your secure status.
The funny thing here: They have active spyware and malware on their app store. They go by vague offical sounding names like "Gallery" and "Messages" "Text Messages"
I've reported it and that goes to an google form where the app stays up. I've even gone farenough where I've escalated through internal Google contacts. Nothing is done. It's not sideloading that's the issue.
It's google. This is a hostile behavior to all users of the devices and developers of their platform.
_--
My thoughts on where this might go:
We're getting into an era where there are organizations that are violently hostile to your device and they demand that. These people believe that the device you paid for and the service you paid for is theirs.
I.e. mobile ids from governments, which may introduce client side scanning. More so, theres a hostile push for "age verification" which would lean on the Play integrity chain. Want to find out who does this? Look into Magisck on reddit and the apps people have difficultly using. This is not a case of "someone wants to hack something".. it's all about control.
If you're watching the Root/third party space.. right now there are issues running apps. Some apps scan for "SuperSU" app and will refuse to run. (As in they're not sandboxed)
They believe it because it’s true. RMS et al. have been predicting this for eons, but now that these companies feel comfortable to move overtly it’s pretty much too late to stop them.
We need to stop calling it "sideloading", we should call it freely installing software. The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever. These are not phones, they are computers shaped like phones, computer which we fully bought with our money, and I we shall install what we want on our own computers.
How badly screwed are we that the term "installing" doesn't work because it doesn't exclude the now default assumption that someone else controls everything you are allowed to install.
> when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever
You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no single villain that James Bond could take down, or that a charistmatic leader could get elected could change. The oil tanker has been moving in that direction for decades. There are legions defending the right to run your own software, but it's a continual war of attrition.
The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.
"Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that."
Unfortunately it also means giving the key to the Kingdom to a company like Microsoft or Google which are definitely adversaries in my book. Keeping them in check was still possible with full system access.
Even Apple I don't trust. They're always shouting about privacy but they define it purely as privacy from third parties, not themselves.
And they were the first to come up with a plan where your phone would spy on you 24/7.
> The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.
I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction.
I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution.
Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.
If you want a real blackpill (I think this is the right word), consider the famous Cathedral and the Bazaar.
I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral.
The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.
>The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky
"side" refers to the fact that it's not going through the first party app store, and doesn't have any negative connotations beyond that. Maybe if it was called "backloading" you'd have a point, but this whole language thing feels like a kerfuffle over nothing.
I get where you are coming from. However, language like this matters when it comes to legislation. People outside there space will be guided by the sideload language to think it's just "something extra on the side so why should I care?"
Language strongly influences how people perceive things. For example, people shown videos of a car crash estimated higher speeds and falsely remembered seeing broken glass if the crash was described as "smashed" or "collided" rather than "hit" or "contacted"[0].
"Direct installation" sounds neutral to me, but "sideloading" sounds advanced or maybe even sneaky.
Why "first party app store"? You mean the play store with that? Why is that necessarily the "first party app store". I mean, for "Google Android" it might be, but not for AOS.
I always found this term utterly bizarre. It first showed up in the early days of the mobile "revolution" and felt astroturfed, since no developer would think we need a fundamentally new term for downloading software. It felt like something some dark patterns team came up with to discourage free installation of software on your own device.
Of course maybe I'm overthinking it. It's common for people deep in the bowels of an industry to invent pointless jargon, like "deplane" for getting off an airplane. Anyone know where the term "sideload" was coined or by whom?
If Google provides a permanent mechanism to disable this in developer settings, then this devolves to an inconvenience.
The setting to allow unsigned apps could be per appstore tracked by an on-device sqlite database, so a badly-behaving app will be known by its installer.
indeed, but they're not talking about your phone, they're talking about android, which is something you don't buy nor own, you buy a license to use it on the provider's terms.
linux phones can't come soon enough ...
your point about the termn "sideloading" is spot on, though. perverting the language is the first step of manipulation: installing software is "sideloading", sharing files is "piracy", legitimate resistance is "terrorism", genocide is "right to defend oneself" ...
> which is something you don't buy nor own, you buy a license to use it on the provider's terms
The distinction between "own" and "license" is purely a legal one. If I buy a kitchen table I own it, I can chop it up and use the pieces to make my own furniture and sell it. When I buy a copy of a Super Mario game I cannot rip the sprites and make my own Super Mario game because I don't own the copyright nor trademark of Super Mario. But I do own the copy, and Nintendo does not get to march into my home and smash my games because they want me to buy the new one instead of playing my old ones.
> linux phones can't come soon enough
GNU/Linux. I used to think Stallman was being petty for insisting on the "GNU" part, but nowadays I understand why he insists on calling it GNU/Linux. There is nothing less "Linux" about Android than Debian, Arch or any other GNU/Linux distro, but GNU/Linux is fundamentally different in terms of user freedom from Android.
That would require a lot tighter and broader (but not corp-controlled) organization than what open source is accustomed to - making cheap and capable phones that aren't tied to a big corp is big challenge.
If you focus on the fact that Google fraudulently marketed an operating system that allows users to run any software they like (until they successfully drove other open options out of the marketplace) you have all the legal justification you need to force Google to back down.
In the US, there's no requirement for a company to honor the claims of prior advertisements for things that they might do in the future for a different product. And even if a company does lie about the features of their product, advertising law does not require a company to change the features of their product to meet those claims. What could be required is a change in the advertising, or a refund for people who bought the devices under the false terms.
But if you advertise a certain side of feature features in a phone three years ago, and sell something completely different next year, that's entirely legal.
It's certainly possible for the same company to create an open platform in addition to a separate platform that is a walled garden.
Microsoft Windows is an open platform that is open to running whatever software you want, while Xbox is a walled garden.
That doesn't mean that Google can fraudulently market an open platform and then close it after driving competing platforms out of the market without running afoul of antitrust law.
However, if Google wants to create a new platform that is a walled garden, as long as they are honest with users about what they are selling, that would be perfectly legal everywhere except the EU.
(This is before Apple/Google lobbying efforts result in either the death of the bill or a bunch of exceptions allowing companies to do "notarization" or "developer verification".)
The Android Developer Blog called it "an ID check at the airport which confirms a traveler's identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags."
From the mouths of rubes, I guess. The ID check at the airport has zero to do with safety or security and everything to do with the airlines' business model (no secondary market for tickets), enforced by government.
>The ID check at the airport has zero to do with safety or security and everything to do with the airlines' business model (no secondary market for tickets), enforced by government.
If it's really about protecting "airlines' business model", why did TSA recently start requiring REAL ID to board flights? Were airlines really losing substantial amounts of money through forged drivers licenses that they felt they needed to crack down?
I think you still have the right to travel without ID. The TSA may demand it, and may tell you it's legally required, but that doesn't make that true. If you show up at the airport without an ID, you'll still be allowed to fly domestically. Of course, how easy that is probably depends on whether you frame it as a "woops!" or as a "fuck you guys!". They'll put you through extra "security" screening and try to confirm your ID other ways.
"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."
This is nonsensical. The minute the government doesn’t check ID to get on a plane that coincides with your ticket, the airline will start doing ID checks before getting on domestic flights just like they do for international flights.
And some airports are now allowing non fliers inside the terminal.
Even hotels force you to verify your ID to check in even though the reservation I’d transferable - just add a guest to your room when you make the reservation.
I know this is side topic but if buying the Android or iPhone hardware gives us hardware we don't control, then what alternatives we realistically have? I do own pinephone (and I was recently reading that they kinda staled with development of new phones hardware), I know about librem.. is there anything else on the market?
LineageOS? /e/OS? ArrowOS? Android has so much momentum that seems like it would be difficult to avoid a fork. I know Waydroid exists, but I'm not sure that's good enough. Ubuntu Touch sounds really cool too, but I've put effort into it with a used Google Pixel 3A and it's not an easy, cheap thing to try out right now. And it's still dependent on binary blobs for drivers, as far as I know. Not a great situation.
Regarding banking apps and things like that, I don't run into to any issues except for not being able to scan checks for deposit on the mobile website. And also I have to have physical credit cards. If you can't do what you need, consider changing to a local credit union which has your interests in mind far more than a for-profit bank.
I've never run into a need for apps for a government purpose, but perhaps I will someday.
I'm sure my situation where I live may be different than your situation where you live.
I don't use an open source fork of Android daily and from what I can tell the best option that exists today.
The only hardware that I know will continue to be open enough for this to be viable in the future is Fairphone. I hope there are others. I would definitely would NOT trust Google Pixel to remain open for the foreseeable future.
Personally, I'm trying to get out of the habit of using my phone anyway, so I might as well have laptop or desktop hardware that can fulfill my needs.
Bought a used iPhone 7 for a specific project requiring a supported OS (iOS15) and having a hardware security module and the phone worked fine for that but Microsoft Authenticator refused to install below iOS 16 for no obvious reason.
There's an overarching lesson that FLOSS needs to learn from the last fifteen years:
If it's not copyleft, it's not free. Also, it's more than just a legal classification of IP law, it's an ethos. I don't care how "free" your underlying OS is, if most of the userland is proprietary and the only way to really effectively use the software on consumer hardware is to use a megacorp's implementation of it and to bow to their whims, it might as well be Microsoft Windows.
This is why I always thought Android never really was Linux. Sure, it has a Linux kernel, but that kernel just exists to run a bunch of software in a way that you have no real control over.
This is laying the groundwork for mandatory software. Soon after this browsers and messengers will be required to install tracking components to be included in the app stores or approved for sideloading.
This is how the surveillance blob will get around the huge backlash to Apple's mandatory on-device child abuse scanning, close off any avenues to escape it before re-introducing mandatory on-device spying.
This is a weak argument. If things have slipped through the cracks with someone actively reviewing it, the alternative cant be 'lets not do any checking whatsoever'.
There are better arguments against this that other commenters here have provided (including "my device, my rule") but this isnt a strong argument.
That's the thing, they don't review their apps, and they actively ignore people flagging apps that are scams or otherwise malicious. Much like their ad empire, its all bots and people making money for pretending to care.
It's not "let's not do any checking whatsoever", it's just "let individual users choose between Google's ineffective checking and alternative app sources that users can trust or not trust with zero involvement from Google".
However, I don't think they haven't measured the number of users installing apps outside of the Play store. May be they just don't care about the small % of total users who are a large % here on HN.
And this will creep out to the major desktop systems too, Apple is doing it with their stupid "non-verified app" and Windows looks more likely to do so with their "need Microsoft account to login" to windows.
It's unfriendly to developers and power users, but very friendly to the other 99.999% of users.
I used to work for Google, on Android security, and it's an ongoing philosophical debate: How much risk do you expose typical users to in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users? Both are important but at some point the typical users have to win because there are far, far more of them.
The article implies that this move is security theater. It's not. I wasn't involved in this decision at all, but the security benefit is clear: Rate limiting.
As the article points out, Google already scans all the devices for harmful apps. The problem is knowing what apps to look for. Static analysis can catch them, dynamic analysis with apps running in virtual environments can catch them, researchers can catch them, users can report them... all of these channels are taken advantage of to identify bad apps and Google Play Protect (or whatever it's called these days) can then identify them on user devices and warn the users, but if bad actors can iterate fast enough they can get apps deployed to devices before Google catches on.
So, the intention here is to slow down that iteration. If attackers use the same developer account to produce multiple bad apps, the dev account will get shut down, requiring the attackers to create a new account, registered with a different user identity and confirmed with different government identification documents.
Note that in the short term this will just create an additional arms race. In order to iterate their malware rapidly, attackers will also need to fake government IDs rapidly. This means Google will have to get better at verifying the IDs, including, I expect, getting set up to be able to verify the IDs using government databases. Attackers will probably respond by finding countries where Google can't do that for whatever reason. Google will have to find some mitigation for that, and so on.
So it won't be a perfect solution, but in the real world, especially at Google scale, there are no perfect solutions. It's all about raising the bar, introducing additional barriers to abuse and making the attackers have to work harder and move slower, which will make the existing mechanisms more effective.
It's not even about power users. The article describes this pretty well: It is about the fact that this action will destroy or at least severely harm the open source app ecosystem. What I can see is that this already has a chilling effect on app developers releasing apps on F-Droid. You might say why should I care about that when I am one of the 99 % of normal users. But it all comes down to freedom. If you destroy alternatives to the Play Store, you remove the freedom of choice that even the 99 % of users would have if they were willing to switch to proper open source solutions.
Does anyone know if there is a concrete evidence that bespoke measure violates the EU's digital markets act?
> in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users
These are the rights of all the users. Take that perspective.
Remotely pushing a code to billions of devices to lock their baisc function (running code user loads) unless the device owner pay and provide sensitive info is a full-scale global malware attack by itself.
Completely false dichotomy - you could release a separate android channel that would require flashing through fastboot but still be signed, don't require unlocked bootloader and fully pass "Play Integrity".
> How much risk do you expose typical users to in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users?
Rights and capabilities are for everyone, even if they're not currently using them due to not being a "power user". They're an important "escape valve": if things get bad enough, normal people become power users out of necessity.
In that case, an ID-gated play store and a developer settings toggle with a scary warning message would serve the same purpose for that 99.999% while leaving the rest minimally affected. Clearly that's not enough for google.
Very few people care about this change. The current outrage will be a distant memory in a few months. I'm sure fdroid will find a path forward. Folks who want to install custom apps on their phone will still be able to do so, maybe with an extra tedious step in some cases but if you're motivated the changes won't stop you.
If that actually were the case, the iPhone would've died in 2007.
In reality, most people don't even know what sideloading is. Those are the people who are buying phones and supporting the market for their existence.
The 0.001% of people who want to side load applications onto their phone, can clamor for a new OS all they want, but unless they put the resources in place to make that happen, it won't.
If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation. When they were working on Ubuntu touch (or whatever their phone version was called), they would show off how cool it was that you could just plug your monitor and input devices into it and boom you’ve got an all in one device.
But who wants that? It’s cool. But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.
> If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation.
It's not a zero-sum game in that regard. The entire point of Linux phones is to get Linux distros working in phone form-factors. Getting them to work as general-purpose computers is the easier, already finished part. Getting them to work as phones is the harder-part, the new work. Removing the easy, already finished part doesn't make writing the camera drivers, modem-handling software, etc. any easier.
> But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.
I'd love to see this. Could the community rally a phone manufacturer with phones at different price points and focus on that? Most projects I've looked at in the past have been as good as dead, or spread across a bunch of outdated or bad phones.
Yeah, all you need to add is a desktop environment and some kernel drivers that are specific for phone hardware.... except that's what AOSP already is.
Can anyone say exactly what this would mean for F-Droid? For instance, not that I want this to happen but if F-Droid really wanted, they could conceivably get verified developer status.
And then they could offer apps, which (again I don't want this, just asking), could also be distributed if verified. F-Droid would have to be verified and would only be able to distribute apps from developers that are also verified.
And so conceivably you could still install apps from outside the Play store if they're verified. Unless the Play store is administering verification.
I'm not saying that would work, in fact, I think in practice it wouldn't. I'm just trying to play out what that would look like to understand the specifics of how F-Droid is being effectively dismantled. But I'm all ears if someone has a different interpretation about how F-Droid lives through this. It would seem that it would only survive on degoogled phones.
> we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.
Since these are open source apps, couldn't f-droid maintain their own fork of each app with a different application identifier?
It would give Google the ability to shutdown F-Droid at will by baning their account and thus far more power to control what F-Droid publishes and how it operates. However, it seems like anyone could fork an open source app and use their own account and setup their own unique identifier for their fork.
No question this increases Google's power but it doesn't seem like it technically makes it impossible to operate a store like F-Droid.
If nothing prevents this from happening, then when it does happen, I will make it a point to carry nothing but a laptop and a dumb phone, maybe a hotspot. If I need something from the internet, I will get it before the trip. If I can't get it on the trip, and forgot to beforehand, I will either find another way, or not do whatever it is.
I don't know why I don't do that now, honestly. Sounds pretty interesting.
You don’t because it’s not reasonable. It’s fun to play with (speaking from experience), but it’s not reasonable in day-to-day life. That’s why smartphones are so successful. That’s why we need to actually open platform.
Open platform would be better, I agree. In the meantime until said open platform actually catches up to the current garbage duopoly, I may have no other choice but to be inconvenienced.
Principle > convenience. I am okay with that. Right now, GrapheneOS works properly and doesn't compromise my principles in exchange for the convenience.
In my eyes, Google is violating my rights because I did not agree to them stopping independent installation. I view them pushing this update as criminal vandalism.
A law with more teeth than the EU's Digital Markets Act (which, contrary to popular belief, does not actually require sideloading) could theoretically be passed. The current (pre-lobbying) iteration of the App Store Freedom Act looks pretty good (ctrl+f "security", "safety", "integrity" returns zero results).
Realistically speaking, that probably won't happen, though. What can you, yourself do to mitigate the impact?
Install a forked version of Android without Developer Verification. LineageOS, GrapheneOS and CalxyOS are all pretty good options. Stop using any apps with remote attestation via Play Integrity, which will mean sacrificing more and more functionality as time goes on. Try to use mobile sites instead of mobile apps as much as possible. Watch the F-Droid catalog get smaller and smaller until it crumbles completely when it becomes unusable by >80% of Android users.
People choose Android because they need / want more control over their system. If Google continues to remove that control, they lose the only thing that gives their OS an edge.
This change would make Google's policies in line with the policies Apple has recently implemented to comply with those court orders you're talking about.
A while ago I implemented some little feature I wanted for an open source app, and tested it on my phone. Only Android development I've ever done, a few hours' work: I wasn't going to get certified as an official Android developer for it. With this, I wouldn't be able to do it? Or rather I could, but could only test with the Android Studio emulator or similar?
Similarly if I just wanted to make something for myself, not distribute it at all, I know have to register with this program just to install my thing on my own phone? I don't think even Apple goes that far?
No. You can still install apks through ADB, which is how you would do it during development. But you won't be able to distribute it without signing it through google.
Agreed, and the only reason I bought a Pixel is because it supports Graphene. But as long as the masses value convenience over privacy and freedom, nothing will change, and Apple/Google will happily keep selling them devices that are now primarily designed to spy on them.
"But as long as the masses value convenience over privacy and freedom, nothing will change, and Apple/Google will happily keep selling them devices that are now primarily designed to spy on them."
When I have taken the time to educate someone on a very personal level about privacy, the person understands the value and will change some of their habits. We can win this.
They all died. There were Linux phones until Android and there were some non-Android phones until Android 8 or so, such as Qt Extended, RIM BlackBerry OS, Palm webOS, Mozilla Firefox OS, and Microsoft Windows Phone, to name a few. They all died from numerous footgun wounds as well as pressures from competition.
VoLTE was one of major contributors to the situation, by the way. Only iOS and Android supported voice call on 4G LTE for first 3-5 years, due to it being a huge pile of TBDs and transitional hacks. There were political fights in whether the LTE is to be 4G or it was to be 3.9999G and superseded quickly by a completely separate 4G standard. This meant that companies and consortium that maintained alternative OS could spend unrealistic amount of lobbying and engineering effort trying to get into it, risking investments needed for it, or give up and start procurement process for a white flag. All chose the latter, and we ended up with an iOS/Android duopoly with unprecedented totality.
I've been using Sailfish OS for quite some time, but I don't do all of my computing on the phone. There's quite a high friction for using any of the mainstream Android apps, so usually you have to find an alternative if possible.
I also use Sailfish OS - its not perfect, but useable. :) And the way Android and iOS goes to shit, its current state might already be better than them soon. ;-)
(Sailfish OS is improving over time, if a bit slowly. :) )
It's kind of ironic that you have to actually give Google money in order to not use Android. I'm still amazed that there's no Graphene support for any other device.
This will shape the future of computing with how Apple being treated as the reference for the whole industry. (I know this is Google here. But our reference devices are iDevices that was unfortunately always locked in the Apple provisioned codesign)
Our “pocket” computers are locked in. The next computing platform will be more wearable such as AR glasses. We’re expected to have 3 players in the upcoming iteration - Apple, Google. Meta due to vivid services needed for valuable glasses services.
Meta already shows how you don’t really own the device by what’s running on it.
It’ll be very sad if next generations most used form of computing will be able to run only border-controlled software.
I have this profound disgusting feeling when I think I'm going to have to ask Google to validate which app I am allowed to install on the phone I paid freaking money to get !
This is not about open source, the government being able to ban apps, or anything else but a principle.
I'm not a child and Google is definitely not an authority respectable enough to tell me what I can't install. They have lied, been sued countless times, had to pay billions of fines,..
At this point, there are 2 alternatives : iphone, grapheneos (don't even start with Linux phone).
Iphone suck just as bad on that matter but at least the software is more suited to professionals, it's not as half ass done as Google software.
Grapheneos, it runs just fine 99% of the time but these last 1% can be so annoying. Like how they disable face unlock, or how some apps refuse to work because of play integrity.
My last hope is that the eu will come once again to the rescue and bring the mfcker at Google who came up with this idea back to earth.
That or ban Google Android version and make an European Android alternative funded and developed by a consortium of tech companies that want to sell phone in Europe.
After all, Europe is even a more interesting market than the usa.
I was a big proponent of the nexus phones and Google's efforts in the space, but I am hundred percent not an android fan anymore.
There's a study on positive or destructive workers, from a business management pov. The finding was that the "bad" employees and the "good" are often the same people: a "good" employee scorned becomes the worst type of employee.
I think Google will be discovering some variant of this from their previous fandom, and it will be too late.
You seem to be framing this as if it were a business decision to curtail competition. I and likely the team pushing these changes only see the security benefits for users through these changes. People have tinted lenses to assume malice when Google does things, but if you've actually ever been close to the decision making process internally it's never anything close to what people seem to imagine. People are overestimating how problematic these changes will be in practice.
Too late for whom though? I suspect it's not Google. The only companies with enough capital to take them on at their own game are somehow even worse, although admittedly the gap is getting narrower by the second.
And yeah, giants occasionally fall suddenly. But mostly just in the software world. Phones require extensive hardware and software knowledge, and increasingly also require playing nice with carriers/TLA government agencies.
Back in "ye olden days" (TM) sideloading was just called "running software".
I think it's very unfortunate that the authors of the article propagate this "sideloading" framing.
I really would love to get rid of everything related to Google, Microsoft and Apple. Too bad I am completely depending on them. Business wise and privately. I wish I would wake up tomorrow with a Linux phone with no crippleware, no notifications, no crappy animations, no limits, no nothing.
I think F-Droid will have to go the ADB route, maybe have a desktop interface to wirelessly ADB install APKs to your devices... could be an awesome way to manage apps on multiple devices! I currently have a powershell script to do all that myself.
You can already bootstrap an ADB connection to your own device without any extra hardware via Shizuku.
Won't be long until F-droid releases a plugin that does the installation via Shizuku.
If users are drawn to the "tree of the knowledge of adb install" then your first assumption should be that the menu in the walled garden is unsatisfactory, not the designs of a serpent.
with all these folding phones and e-ink mobile sized e-readers having gone through several generations, I'm beginning to think the next big kickstarter[0] is a dumb e-ink phone/wifi modem connected as a 5g modem to an amoled linux tablet.
[0] No royalties required if you pick up my "fantastic" idea, just send me a free device
I just wish BlackBerry went in a different direction. If during the early-mid 2010s they decided to dedicate to open-source and privacy-first, as well as keeping their flagship QWERTY format with the optimized BlackBerryOS, they could still be around serving a particularly large niche in the smartphone market: Those who use their phone for communication and utility over entertainment.
Maybe they can make a comeback. If anyone at BlackBerry is reading this, just do it, please and thank you.
It's logical, and comes down to accuracy and comfort. It's the same reason why mechanical keyboards are best on desktop, not those silly flat Apple butterfly keyboards.
What I'm sad about is the fact that the QWERTY format was completely abandoned to cater to the entertainment-focused users on Android and iOS. Those are also the people who "don't care about privacy" and are fine with walled gardens, as long as their TikTok, Facebook and Netflix work.
Is typing on a touchscreen phone really that difficult for people? I did a Monkeytype test just now on my iPhone. I got 50WPM in the 30 second test. For comparison, I get about 100WPM when I type on a regular computer keyboard.
I feel like getting 50% typing speed isn't so bad, and I doubt I would get a lot better than that with physical buttons. Generally I'd rather have more screen real estate.
That said, I definitely prefer physical buttons for games.
Google has made a terrible decision and their justification for doing this is just laughable. Already right now, if a user wants to install an unverified app, they have to explicitly allow it through settings. They could have moved this option in to the developer settings feature to make it harder for normal people to sideload but still allow developers to sideload. Also Play Store itself is plagued with apps with severe vulnerabilities.
Google has lost its consumers for good. This is really sad. I have no reason to buy an android anymore when I upgrade my phone in the future. At least Apple does gaslight us
i am just waiting on the same thing that happened with sony and geohot to happen to google as well. blocking sideloading will annoy some very smart and maybe dangerous people
Most consumers DON'T CARE. They want their phones to access Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Bluesky, their banking, shopping, and food order apps, etc. If anything they'd be glad to know that Google is stopping entire classes of malware at the source. This is an anti-techie move, not an anti-consumer move. Only techies care about being able to run any software you want on a device you own. Most people don't really want to own a computer because owning one means you are responsible for administrating it, and that's well beyond normies' capability and/or well outside the things they want to spend time or energy fucking with. They just want access to what the computer enables.
Continuing to bang on this drum has "less space than a Nomad, lame" energy. Except it's political, so you sound even more like an autistic loon. Start thinking, techies. Not everybody is remotely like you. 99% of Google's customer base don't care about this, and Google may have actually increased Android's value to end users.
They want to use Facebook, Instagram, TikTok... The exact services that wouldn't exist in the first place if there wasn't for the open neutral Internet, something they didn't care about too.
> if you compile from source and deploy via adb nothing changes
That's not how I understand it. Do you have a source?
"Starting in September 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices."
> Android Studio is unaffected because deployments performed with adb, which Android Studio uses behind the scenes to push builds to devices, is unaffected.
Yes, like the software for my ebike conversion kit for which I only have the APK. I have vetted the software and would like to install it. If Google blocks that, then fuck them.
it's always hilarious (and there's a lot of this going on right now) when major players eliminate themselves from the competition, while deluding themselves that they've eliminated the competition.
Meh, I can still install what I want via adb. It's probably a good thing most people won't be able to click a link and have a new program installed by an anonymous person. Especially in an ecosystem where .apks are passed around manually
As with manifest v3, Google is once again misusing their position as a source of open standards to benefit their adware business. Hopefully the EU fines them once again.
A weird hill to choose to die on given that in practice it's not really a meaningful percentage of people that are using adblockers and the negative PR they get from these oversteps is massive.
I believed the EU specifically ruled that Apple's rules which include this are NOT ok. And they're currently fighting Apple about it. Unless I missed something.
Dare I say it, I think we're being too harsh on Google here.
When you own a massively successful consumer product like Android, which is foundational to users' lives, you have an obligation to your users to keep them safe*. Sometimes you will have to choose between protecting users who don't know what they are doing at the expense of limiting users who know what they are doing. In this case, they have chosen to err on the side of the former.
I get it. It's OK to not like this development, especially if you use a lot of sideloaded apps. However, if you call this "anti-consumer", then perhaps you and Google have different notions of who the consumers are.
All said and done, Android/Pixel is still the most open mobile platform. Users are still free to install other AOSP-based OSes such as Graphene OS, which have no such restrictions on sideloading.
PS: I'm a former Google employee. I don't think I am a Google shill. I worked on mobile security, but I was not involved on this matter.
* I am using "safety" as a catch all for privacy and security as well.
AOSP is starting to be locked down. Google's idea of promoting safety is charging developers for recognition. When there's a profit incentive involved, no, we are not being "too harsh"
> Android/Pixel is still the most open mobile platform
There are 2 options in this space (practically). Being better than Apple, who is explicit about the fact that they own every iPhone on the planet, is not a flex.
Do you think Apple is being reckless not doing the same thing on MacOS, Microsoft on Windows? Is the population too stupid to be permitted general purpose computers?
>Is the population too stupid to be permitted general purpose computers?
I'm strongly against this Android change (for a simple reason written below) but the answer to this is a resounding yes! The general population is a complete security disaster with unsigned software! The latest generations being brought up within abstracted mobile ecosystems are no improvement either on that front (probably worse).
That said - and I think this is a key point in this debate - sideloading apps is already a fringe part of the Android ecosystem. The vast majority of average Android users will never interface with this functionality. Well there is still obviously a security risk as with any time unsigned software is offered, it doesn't seem to me to be a major issue in the ecosystem. This is clearly about control, not security. Let's say there is more antitrust action and Google loses more control over their preferred forced storefront monopoly within the ecosystem. With this change, at least according my understanding of it, they are still the arbiter of what is allowed on the platform and not even if an app comes from another app store.
> …perhaps you and Google have different notions of who the consumers are.
A relatively small percentage of HN users have empathy for people who haven't the faintest idea how their gadgets work and no curiosity about learning that. It can seem inconceivable.
I agree with you that normal people deserve safety when using their most intimate device, and that backdoors that can give technical people unfettered access will ultimately be abused by bad actors. I wish the world didn't work this way, but it's the one we live in.
> have empathy for people who haven't the faintest idea how their gadgets work and no curiosity about learning that.
I sincerely hope that a lot of people are actually better than how the stereotypes may make one think. Empathy (or lack of it) doesn't change the issue: users are deprived of choice and forced to go along a corporate decision, whenever it benefits them or not.
Ultimately, it all boils down to lack of informed consent and power/voice disparity between casual users and large corporations, especially when the choice is limited (and we have a de-facto duopoly). What you're seeing here is users expressing their dissatisfaction with a major decision that goes against their interests and that they had no say in. Have some empathy for those folks too.
I'm pretty sure most people who are unhappy about the news don't want to harm anyone and find no enjoyment if someone is harmed by lacking informedness. I'm very confident there are ways to present the issue and give a choice in a manner that is comprehensible to anyone, without requiring any technical knowledge. Every competent adult should be able to decide if they want to risk a thief gaining access to all their accounts at the benefit of ability to have extended control over their phone. Or be unable to install applications not blessed by the vendor, at the benefit of vendor promising to keep them safe from malware. I might not do the best job here, but I strongly believe that such things can be explained to anyone regardless of their life choices.
That's not what Google is doing, and their disrespect for user autonomy should not be confused for a lack of empathy towards those who don't understand computers.
Consider this framing: there's a controversy whenever it's acceptable that one could be punished for their choices on how their devices behave. I.e. whenever users willing to have better control over their devices should be punished by a refusal to access a lot of popular apps, sometimes even resulting in social awkwardness. I'm sure that empathetic people can see how this can feel unfair.
Yes, these big corporations are truly benevolent entities who are only looking out for the common man, and us software engineers are out of touch and "lack empathy".
It couldn't possibly be a frustration and concern that this is blatantly anti-competitive and serves to make Google considerably more money and leaves us with little/no options for people who actually know how to use a computer.
Frankly I think the security argument is largely a smokescreen to avoid discussions of anti-trust.
Let's take this to the logical extreme: I can make my phone even more secure if I pound a nail through it so that it doesn't turn on anymore. The phone is really secure now; it is impossible to install any malware on it, no one can install a bitcoin miner or track my credit cards or anything.
Even better, how about we replace the concept of "smartphone" with a glossy print of a Pixel phone that people can carry in their pocket? It would be lighter and completely secure as there would be no way to run any software on it.
Obviously I'm being farcical here, but ultimately I think there's a spectrum of security, and generally speaking these kinds of "security increases" end up making the phone less useful. Sideloading apps is already disabled by default. Most users aren't going to enable it; really the only people who are going to enable this are nerds who want to sideload stuff, and there's a strong selection bias towards people who know how to take care of themselves in the first place.
Also, frankly I don't really buy the "security" argument anyway. These companies aren't selfless benevolent entities who care so much about us, they are for-profit enterprises. If all apps need to be approved by and purchased through Google, then they can extract more money from users, which wouldn't be true with a side-loaded app store (e.g. what Amazon tried).
I currently run an iPhone, but I don't like how locked down it is and I have considered moving back to Android because of that, but now I'm not really seeing the point. I could of course install Lineage or Graphene or something else but that's considerably more effort.
If I buy a Google Pixel device then I AM a consumer. You don't have to choose, you could release a separate device for those who know what they're doing, just like Mozilla releases a separate edition of Firefox that doesn't require signatures.
And yes, I while I can still install some alternative OS on my older Pixel (now Google has stopped providing device trees for the newer ones which I therefore won't buy), Google constantly tries to make this as insufferable as possible with their "Play Integrity" crap.
> now Google has stopped providing device trees for the newer ones which I therefore won't buy
Yeah, that sucks. I don't know if they made any official statement on that. I hope they will continue releasing device trees. It's a feather in their cap that the best mobile device to use for de-Googling so far was a Pixel device (with alt OSes). I hope they won't lose that distinction.
If you want to install software on your Microsoft Windows computer, it has to be signed by a verified developer, otherwise you get an overridable warning that the developer cannot be verified, the software may contain malware etc.
If you want to install software on you MacOS machine, the same thing applies. It must come from a verified developer with an apple account, otherwise you get a warning and must jump through hoops to override. As of macos15.1 this is considerably more difficult to override.
If you want to install iOS apps, the apps have to be signed by a verified developer. Theres no exceptions.
I just dont see a future where being able to create and publish an app anonymously is going to be supported.
Becoming a verified developer is a PITA, and can take a while or be impossible (i.e. getting a DUNS number if you're in a sanctioned country might be not at all possible) but at the same time, eliminating the ability of our devices from running any old code it downloads and runs is a huge safety win.
I'm okay with overridable warnings, having to open system settings to override the verification, etc. It's a "huge safety win" for the 80% of users who don't really know what they're doing, security wise. But not for me.
I won't be using any OS that doesn't allow me to step outside its walled garden, if I have any alternatives at all. With macOS it's quite simple - the second they won't allow apps from unverified/unsigned developers, I'm switching to Linux. On mobile, I might as well switch to iOS, since I'm not really sure what else Android offers anymore that's so compelling, other than being able to install apps directly. And then I'll just wait for a Linux phone or something.
But Apple will change those "warnings" into straight-up lies, and fail to mention the user can override them, and hide those overrides in non-discoverable places:
Whenever I try to open an unverified app, this popup comes up saying "[AppName] Not Opened" "Apple could not verify [AppName] is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy." Then there's only two options to either press "Done" or "Move to Trash." - https://old.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1ekv55h/cant_right_cli...
> I just dont see a future where being able to create and publish an app anonymously is going to be supported.
This is strongly needed if surveillance laws like Chat Control are not to be trivially bypassed. This way applications that don't offer governments the required surveillance features can be banned and the developpers can be sued. Not looking forward to that.
I dunno man, it doesn't feel like a "huge safety win" that my computer has to check with a singular US tech company before it will let me use any software on it.
That's only sorta how it usually works. The developer has to check with a singular US tech company before they can sign the software they've given you.
Except yeah, the way this android stuff works is closer to that way. Instead of Google giving out a key for signing, they instead ask for one and tie a developer to a namespace, so yeah, I guess your Android phone has to check whether or not that namespace is "in the clear"
> eliminating the ability of our devices from running any old code it downloads and runs is a huge safety win
No, this is just false. There's numerous, well-documented instances of malware making it past gatekeepers security checks. This move is exclusively about Google asserting control over users and developers and has nothing to do with security or safety.
The only "huge safety win" comes from designing more secure execution models (capabilities, sandboxing, virtual machines) that are a property of the operating system, not manual inspection by some megacorp (or other human organization).
Thats a false equivalency. I didnt say that software was safe because its been checked. Just that at the least, one can somewhat figure out where the software came from.
Getting a DUNS number obviously doesn't make it so that you cant publish malware. It just provides a level of traceability/obstacle that slows down the process of distributing malware.
Installing any app I want outside the Play Store was the primary reason I decided to go with Android, despite most of the people I know using iPhones. If I can't do this anymore, I may as well switch and be able to use iMessage and FaceTime with them.
Android is losing a unique selling point. This will have an impact on what a techie may recommend to a non-techie in the future, because everything is beige now.
I have the feeling Google has given up on using nerds as beachheads. The market is saturated enough and they don't need us anymore to do grass roots spreading of their products. It's the same with Youtube. As long as there were enough people who were unencumbered by ads because of their ad block and kept spreading links, the importance of Youtube was growing. After market saturation that vehicle isn't necessary anymore and they can squeeze them out.
This is unacceptable.
Google needs to be broken up. Apple too.
The lack of antitrust enforcement is a clown show.
We have no choice in the most important computing category in the world. It's a duopoly and they have everyone in straightjackets - consumers, companies, competitors, governments, ...
A huge percentage of the world's thoughts and economy flow through mobile. And two companies own it.
Ma Bell was nothing compared to this.
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Yes! Android doesn’t need an USP. Not anymore now that we have a stable equilibrium of this perfect duopoly.
[dead]
F-droid routinely delivers me higher quality, more reliable apps that do exactly what I need then to do too.
It's become my go-to for "I need a utility for X task".
Same here. F droid gives clean functional and reliable apps while playstore is a dumpsterfire.
>I may as well switch and be able to use iMessage and FaceTime with them
I, too, love vendor lockin.
It is not just that. In my case , everyone around me are using iphone . I made the sacrifice to not easily connect with them and use android so that i have freedom ( to install, customise what ever). Once that freedom aspect is taken away. There is no reason for me to make that sacrifice.
Until EU's cross compatibility between messaging apps is passed, we are forced to be in vendor lockin.
I have no idea why iMessage and FaceTime are draws when Signal is available.
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I mean, we have mandatory Play Store services, so the experience on android is not significantly less locked-in.
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Another road that leads to BBM it seems.
It’s utterly bizarre how BBM could have been the iMessage and WhatsApp and who knows what else. But rich out-of-touch people thinking exclusivity is a perk in a commodities market just shows how business savvy and wealth are in reality disconnected from eachother.
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Check UbuntuTouch, it's really a nice third option. The OS is refreshing and the dev community active.
We do not have to choose the lesser of two evils this time.
I glanced at Ubuntu Touch, but its device compatibility looked severely lacking (https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/).... I have old Pixel phones I could potentially try it out on, but the last Pixel phone that is officially supported is the 3a. So that is a bummer.
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"Refreshing" is an interesting adjective to use. I don't want a refreshing OS. I want a rock stable OS that sips battery.
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I wonder if banking and messaging apps will work on it in the future
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Yeah... Does it support WhatsApp? If not that's a deal-breaker in most of the world.
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Ubuntu touch has a locked-down filesystem, like Android does. Mobian, PureOS and postmarketOS behave much more like regular GNU/Linux.
Not a lot of life left in Pixel 3 phones.
I just switched to the iPhone with the new cycle, explicitly because of this news.
Sideloading was the killer feature for me as well.
> I just switched to the iPhone with the new cycle, explicitly because of this news.
And guess what, sideloading has never been allowed on iPhones.
So you just went from bad to worse. The only rational option for tech-minded people nowadays is to buy a device that supports Lineage or Graphene (ironically Pixels are good for this) and to replace the stock OS.
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Then you'd be rewarding the company that pioneered and normalized taking away these rights. The next rights you'll lose will probably originate on Apple again years before Google takes them away too.
It doesn't make any difference anyway, does it?
Then I might as well treat myself with better hardware & ecosystem.
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I think this isn’t true at all, before the iPhone existed cellular carriers controlled software on consumer phones.
Remember when GPS navigation was a $5/month app that was a cellular plan addon?
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You can still install apps outside the play store, but the developer does need to verify their signing information. Effectively this means that any app you install must have a paper trail to the originating developer, even if its not on the app store. On one hand, I can see the need for this to track down virus creators, but on the other, it provides Google transparency and control over side loaded app. It IS a concerning move, but currently this is far from 'killing' non-appstore apps for most of the market.
So let's pick a random example app that might be popular on F-Droid today. Oh, I dunno...newpipe.
Given that Google both owns Android/Google Play Store and YouTube: what do you think they would do with the developer information of someone who makes an app that skirts their ad-model for YouTube?
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Google is following the same game plan we saw when they decided that the full version of uBlock Origin (the version that is still effective on YouTube) should no longer be allowed within their browser monopoly.
The fact that there was a temporary workaround didn't change the endgame.
It's just there to boil the frog more slowly and keep you from hopping out of the pot.
It's the same game plan Microsoft used to force users to use an online Microsoft account to log onto their local computer.
Temporary workarounds are not the same thing as publicly abandoning the policy.
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From a quick glance at /r/GooglePlayDeveloper/ it looks like Google is just as interested in killing playstore apps! It seems that they only want to support the existing larger apps now. I think they are giving a clear message to developers that its not really worth developing for that platform anymore. I think we will all agree that the playstore needed a purge but they seem to be making it impossible for any new solo devs at this point.
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> currently this is far from 'killing' non-appstore apps for most of the market.
It means that Android is no longer suitable for my own private dev projects.
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It also makes it easy for google to blacklist a developer, if for example the trump administration don’t like them (the same way apple removing apps documenting ICE).
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Pretty sure virus creators could just pick a real ID leaked by the "adult only logins" shenanigans, whereas legit app developers probably wouldn't want to commit identity fraud.
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Yeah... no. This is normal with desktop computers. Let's stop handholding people. If I trust the source, I trust the domain... I want to be able to install app from its source.
Googles/Apples argument would have been much stronger if their stores managed to not allow scams/malware/bad apps to their store but this is not the case. They want to have the full control without having the full responsibility. It's just powergrab.
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> need for this to track down virus creators
I think they’re just going to track down a random person in a random country who put their name down in exchange for a modest sum of money. That’s if there’s even a real person at the other end. Do you really think that malware creators will stumble on this?
This has to be about controlling apps that are inconvenient to Google. Those that are used to bypass Google’s control and hits their ad revenue or data collection efforts.
It's killing F-Droid, which is the only place I want to sideload from.
It makes sense for average users to have identifiable traceability.
Developers, and power users often pre-date these kinds of smartphones.
Switching to iPhone will make it even more obvious there is an unhealthy monopoly, so that's nice. If there's no good reason to choose Android, why not?
What we really need is a fair alternative to both these abuse platforms. Choosing an unfamiliar abuse over a familiar abuse isn't exactly the smartest move. The switch over to a free(dom) platform like plain Linux must happen even if we have to make some temporary sacrifices like the loss of mobile banking facilities. It can't be worse than using a feature phone, can it? The app ecosystem will eventually attain parity if the platform achieves popularity.
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"If I can't do this anymore..."
How will Google force Android users to "update" so sideloadinng can be prevented
Non-updated versions of Android running non-updated versions of sideloaded apps will not have the restriction
Another example of how not every "update" is for "security" and "updates" should be optional
The computer owner chooses one version of an operating system, e.g., "I chose Android because I can sideload any app", but by allowing automatic updates, without reviewing them first, the computer owner agrees to let the operating system vendor change the software remotely to anything the vendor chooses. The computer owner goes along with whatever the vendor decides, letting the vendor take them for a ride
If the operating system gets _worse_ in the opinion of the computer owner, if it fails to meet their needs, e.g., "sideloading", then that's too bad. The computer owner chose one version of Android, but by subscribing to "automatic updates" they effectively chose all future versions as well
This is why I prefer BSD UNIX-like operating system projects where I can choose to update or not to update. Unlike the hypothetical Android user, the project does not decide for me
HN replies may try to draw attention to "security" and away from "sideloading restriction". However there is no option to accept "security updates" while rejecting "sideloading restriction updates". According to the so-called "tech" companies that conduct data collection and surveillance as a "business model" through free, auto-updated software, every update, no matter what it contains, is deemed essential and critical for "security"
Online commentators seem to agree that the computer owner should have the choice to install or not install _any_ software outside the "app store", so-called "sideloading". Perhaps this freedom to choose whether to install or not install software should also apply to operating system "updates"
> How will Google force Android users to "update" so sideloadinng can be prevented
Google has the Google Play Services, which can be remotely updated via the Play Store, as has been done for the COVID exposure notification system [0]. Google's Play Protect already hooks into the installation process and could be updated to enforce the signatures.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_Notification
What happens if the computer owner disables Google Play Services along with the Play Store and keeps the phone offline
(Own experients conducted over the years make this a "rhetorical question" meaning I already know the answer)
Not every app requires Play Services and internet access
(Online commentators sometimes try to argue that all apps, even offlines ones, "require" Play Services otherwise they cannot be updated automatically, highlighting the significance of "automatic updates" in steering debates about Android. Own experiments show that many if not most apps work fine without Play Services and can be updated manually if desired)
Not every phone is used for banking or other "government services"
(For example, some owners have mulltiple phones. Some owners may have phones with older versions of mobile OS that may be used for experiments)
Not every computer owner is the same
(For example, most phone owners do not install any apps at all. Of those that do, most use "app stores", not so-called "sideloading")
HN replies are likely to invoke "security" as a retort to any suggestion of decision-making and control being placed with the computer owner
Automatic updates are pretty unrelated. Google can just release an updated version of google play services or a device verification API and everyone's banking/government ID apps will stop working until you manually update anyway. They have a pretty big stick to whack you over the head with if you don't update to the new version "for security"
I might as well get a landline/dumbphone and a small linux tablet.
Maybe it’s because I’m European but I’ve never understood what iMessage even is or what it offers above either sms or WhatsApp/signal. And I’ve used an iPhone for the past 15 years.
For me, mainly: no international cost, no metered cost (other than data), no extra app like WhatsApp to install (but other party needs iOS).
Edit: that said, nowadays, maybe because I'm back in the EU, I use WhatsApp way more often than iMessage.
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Refuse to participate in either walled garden.
There are no good reasons left to use either platform - you're basically paying an arm and a leg to rent a device whose primary purpose is to usurp your attention and plunder your wallet at every possible opportunity.
Use and encourage your circle to use Signal, so you're not limited to any given platform, or the political or ideological whims of the gardenmeisters.
Google has gone full enshittified with this move, might as well move as far and as fast away from all the shit if you're technically capable, introduce whatever pressure you can to signal that there's a desperate need in the smartphone market for something clean and honest.
“There are no good reasons” really? One of my favorite things about iOS/ipados is the incredible selection of music creation apps. My iPad is loaded with synths, sequencers, and effects. AUM in particular is an amazing program for live performances mixing both software and hardware using a touch interface.
Many, but not all, of the programs I use on iPad are also available on Mac and Windows at much higher prices. That alone is reason enough to use a iPad. Most of these apps can be run on the least expensive iPad and/or older ones.
Like it or not, computing appliances have led to really good software markets. The “clean and honest” software markets are either much more expensive or don’t exist at all. The optimist in me is hoping that Android losing some freedom might lead to higher quality software and some actual competition to Apple.
Probably the only real benefit now is Firefox/alt browsers
Firefox with UBO is still a huge win. But Orion browser is making progress. At this point I just don’t see a reason to go android anymore. If I have to be part of a walled garden I may as well choose the nicer one.
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You could also use a thirdparty ROM.
How long until AOSP deviates so much from features in 3rd party ROMs that it becomes infeasible to for amateur developers to maintain them?
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And in the EU you can install apps outside of the AppStore on your iPhone!
But not outside of Apple's control, they have a very similar mechanism to this verification process with 3rd party app stores.
Thats a recent addition; hope consumer protection laws around the world become better.
It's ironic that they pull this bullshit while at the same time putting out their "Vanilla Pro" ad mocking Apple's ecosystem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnWykPvftfg
Same, I'm tempted to call android just a shittier iPhone now
What part of cheaper, better, and open source is shittier exactly?
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> Installing any app I want outside the Play Store was the primary reason I decided to go with Android
You still can do that with PWAs in Android. Let's see for how long.
Do you have a single friend who isn't a programmer who has installed a PWA in the last two years?
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> PWAs
And I wonder when can we stop lying to ourselves pretending "web"-apps are real (native) apps?
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There is a big difference between Websites and Applications. Websites are a smaller subset of capabilities.
You can still side-load signed apps. It's a similar limitation to macOS which won't let you run apps that Apple hasn't signed without command line or control panel shenanigans. Compared to iOS, Android still has the advantage of installing your own full browser (like Firefox) with full-fat ad blocking (uBlock Origin, not Lite). iOS is Safari-only right now though, in theory, some alternative engines may be available in Europe later.
If they need to be signed by Google, that's not side loading by definition; it's using an alternate Google channel.
What your describing isn't "side-loading". Doing that means the apps go through Google's chain of control. Please don't let them redefine the word.
With macOS you run "sudo spctl --master disable", and then you can run whatever you want without sending PII to Apple. Is that the case with the new Android stuff?
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You can install full uBlock Origin in the Orion browser, on iOS. It also has decent built-in ad blocking (though uBlock Origin is still better).
I had been thinking for a long time to switch to Android (GrapheneOS, probably) when my current iPhone 13 dies, but this whole thing with "sideloading" on Android is making me reconsider. If I can't have the freedom I want either way, might as well get longer support, polished animation and better default privacy (though I still need to opt-out of a bunch of stuff).
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> It's a similar limitation to macOS which won't let you run apps that Apple hasn't signed without command line or control panel shenanigans
Can you do something similar to load unsigned apps on Android?
Agreed. While I do not like this move, ti is weird to me how far people are going in their criticism.
The perfect should not be the enemy of the good.
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Antitrust action is badly needed in this area. It is ridiculous that I need permission from my device manufacturer to install software on hardware I own. There is no viable alternative than to live in Apple and Google’s ecosystems. This duopoly cannot be allowed to keep this much control of the mobile platforms.
There needs to be a mandatory override for any lock down put in place by a manufacturer. I understand the need for security, but it should be illegal to prevent me from bypassing security if I decide to on my own device. Make it take multiple clicks and show me scary warnings, that's fine.
Technically Android still allows installation of anything if you use the debugging tool. Maybe that is where we have to draw the line, I'm not sure.
Especially when partaking in the duopoly is literally mandatory for life: banking, government services, basic communication, etc.
Monopolies hold the US back and it can't coast on their success forever.
This seems to be a place where we need a state like CA to take the lead.
Are there consumer watchdogs in CA that would champion something like this?
you don't need permission for the hardware... you can install your own OS.
Aside from everyone pointing out that you can't do that on most phones, there's also the fact that installing your own OS will block you from using many apps that check your secure status.
>you can install your own OS
https://github.com/zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame
Not if you don't have permission to install your own OS...
Didn't Google recently kill AOSP and stop providing board support packages for their phones?
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Can you, with SecureBoot?
The funny thing here: They have active spyware and malware on their app store. They go by vague offical sounding names like "Gallery" and "Messages" "Text Messages"
I've reported it and that goes to an google form where the app stays up. I've even gone farenough where I've escalated through internal Google contacts. Nothing is done. It's not sideloading that's the issue.
It's google. This is a hostile behavior to all users of the devices and developers of their platform.
_--
My thoughts on where this might go:
We're getting into an era where there are organizations that are violently hostile to your device and they demand that. These people believe that the device you paid for and the service you paid for is theirs.
I.e. mobile ids from governments, which may introduce client side scanning. More so, theres a hostile push for "age verification" which would lean on the Play integrity chain. Want to find out who does this? Look into Magisck on reddit and the apps people have difficultly using. This is not a case of "someone wants to hack something".. it's all about control.
If you're watching the Root/third party space.. right now there are issues running apps. Some apps scan for "SuperSU" app and will refuse to run. (As in they're not sandboxed)
They believe it because it’s true. RMS et al. have been predicting this for eons, but now that these companies feel comfortable to move overtly it’s pretty much too late to stop them.
Google know full well that it's malware. They also know that it makes them money so they're not going to do anything.
We need to stop calling it "sideloading", we should call it freely installing software. The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever. These are not phones, they are computers shaped like phones, computer which we fully bought with our money, and I we shall install what we want on our own computers.
I like the term "direct install" which someone suggested in one of the previous threads.
Or just "install". This word was sufficient my entire life until the Apple App Store came along and hijacked it.
"Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks"
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ADgS_vMGgzY&t=3s
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I wonder where the term started?
Android itself calls it "install" when you open an APK file, there's not mention of "sideload" in Android at all as far as I can tell.
There is, actually, but in a different context. The `adb sideload` command allows you to boot a device from an image without flashing it.
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How badly screwed are we that the term "installing" doesn't work because it doesn't exclude the now default assumption that someone else controls everything you are allowed to install.
> when in reality it is what we have been able to do on our computers since forever
You do realise that's been changing right? Slowly of course, there's no single villain that James Bond could take down, or that a charistmatic leader could get elected could change. The oil tanker has been moving in that direction for decades. There are legions defending the right to run your own software, but it's a continual war of attrition.
The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.
"Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers—you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that."
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Yeah in the name of "security".
Unfortunately it also means giving the key to the Kingdom to a company like Microsoft or Google which are definitely adversaries in my book. Keeping them in check was still possible with full system access.
Even Apple I don't trust. They're always shouting about privacy but they define it purely as privacy from third parties, not themselves.
And they were the first to come up with a plan where your phone would spy on you 24/7.
> The vast majority of people on this site (especially those who entered the industry post dot-com crash) ridicule Stallman.
I've been in tech and startup culture for over a thousand programmer-years (25-30 normal years). It wasn't dot-com or the crash. It was mobile. The mobile ecosystem has always been user-hostile and built around the exploitation of the customer rather than serving the customer. When the huge mobile wave hit (remember "mobile is the future" being repeated the way political pundits repeat talking points?) the entire industry was bent in that direction.
I'm not sure why this is. It could have been designed and planned, or it could have evolved out of the fact that mobile devices were initially forced to be locked down by cell carriers. I remember how hard it was for Blackberry and Apple to get cell carriers to allow any kind of custom software on a user device. They were desperately terrified of being commoditized the way the Internet has commoditized telcos and cable companies. Maybe the ecosystem, by being forced to start out in a locked-down way, evolved to embrace it. This is known as path-dependence in evolution.
Edit: another factor, I think, is that the Internet had no built in payment system. As a result there was a real scramble to find a way to make it work as a business. I've come to believe that if a business doesn't bake in a viable and honest business model from day zero, it will eventually be forced to adopt a sketchy one. All the companies that have most aggressively followed the "build a giant user base, then monetize" formula have turned to total shit.
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If you want a real blackpill (I think this is the right word), consider the famous Cathedral and the Bazaar.
I recently had a realization: I can name Cathedrals, that are 800 years old, and still standing. I can't name a single Bazaar stall more than 50 years old around any Cathedral that's still standing. The Cathedral's builders no doubt bought countless stone and food from the Bazaar, making the Bazaar very useful for building Cathedrals with, but the Bazaar was historically ephemeral.
The very title of the essay predicts failure. The very metaphor for the philosophy was broken from the start. Or, in a twisted accidentally correct way, it was the perfect metaphor for how open-source ends up as Cathedral supplies.
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>The term "sideloading" makes it sound shady and hacky
"side" refers to the fact that it's not going through the first party app store, and doesn't have any negative connotations beyond that. Maybe if it was called "backloading" you'd have a point, but this whole language thing feels like a kerfuffle over nothing.
I get where you are coming from. However, language like this matters when it comes to legislation. People outside there space will be guided by the sideload language to think it's just "something extra on the side so why should I care?"
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Sounds like "sidestepping" i.e. doing something illegitimately or at least outside the normal path.
Language strongly influences how people perceive things. For example, people shown videos of a car crash estimated higher speeds and falsely remembered seeing broken glass if the crash was described as "smashed" or "collided" rather than "hit" or "contacted"[0].
"Direct installation" sounds neutral to me, but "sideloading" sounds advanced or maybe even sneaky.
[0] https://www.simplypsychology.org/loftus-palmer.html
Why "first party app store"? You mean the play store with that? Why is that necessarily the "first party app store". I mean, for "Google Android" it might be, but not for AOS.
if anything, installing the app spoon fed to you by your phone OS provider should get the pejorative.
Let's calling, "Lameloading" or something to really nail it home.
I always found this term utterly bizarre. It first showed up in the early days of the mobile "revolution" and felt astroturfed, since no developer would think we need a fundamentally new term for downloading software. It felt like something some dark patterns team came up with to discourage free installation of software on your own device.
Of course maybe I'm overthinking it. It's common for people deep in the bowels of an industry to invent pointless jargon, like "deplane" for getting off an airplane. Anyone know where the term "sideload" was coined or by whom?
No I don't know.
But: "side talking" Is a worthwhile distraction to Google and look at Nokia N-gage memes.
I prefer the term "unlocked install". Consumers are already familiar with the terms: locked phones and unlocked phones.
Mandatory googleloading.
How about "unlocked install"?
Consumers are already familiar with what a "locked phone" is.
Unfortunately not. They are calling it "phone" and ("rooted phone" or "unlocked phone").
Sounds too much like illegal jailbreaking. Direct install better IMO
If Google provides a permanent mechanism to disable this in developer settings, then this devolves to an inconvenience.
The setting to allow unsigned apps could be per appstore tracked by an on-device sqlite database, so a badly-behaving app will be known by its installer.
Have you read anything about this? What you are proposing is exactly what is being disabled.
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I like your point. Never thought of it that way. Totally agree
indeed, but they're not talking about your phone, they're talking about android, which is something you don't buy nor own, you buy a license to use it on the provider's terms.
linux phones can't come soon enough ...
your point about the termn "sideloading" is spot on, though. perverting the language is the first step of manipulation: installing software is "sideloading", sharing files is "piracy", legitimate resistance is "terrorism", genocide is "right to defend oneself" ...
> which is something you don't buy nor own, you buy a license to use it on the provider's terms
The distinction between "own" and "license" is purely a legal one. If I buy a kitchen table I own it, I can chop it up and use the pieces to make my own furniture and sell it. When I buy a copy of a Super Mario game I cannot rip the sprites and make my own Super Mario game because I don't own the copyright nor trademark of Super Mario. But I do own the copy, and Nintendo does not get to march into my home and smash my games because they want me to buy the new one instead of playing my old ones.
> linux phones can't come soon enough GNU/Linux. I used to think Stallman was being petty for insisting on the "GNU" part, but nowadays I understand why he insists on calling it GNU/Linux. There is nothing less "Linux" about Android than Debian, Arch or any other GNU/Linux distro, but GNU/Linux is fundamentally different in terms of user freedom from Android.
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> linux phones can't come soon enough ...
That would require a lot tighter and broader (but not corp-controlled) organization than what open source is accustomed to - making cheap and capable phones that aren't tied to a big corp is big challenge.
> "your point about the termn "sideloading" is spot on, though. perverting the language is the first step of manipulation [...]."
Precisely.
I call "running unsigned binaries"
They are signed, though. Just not by Google.
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If you focus on the fact that Google fraudulently marketed an operating system that allows users to run any software they like (until they successfully drove other open options out of the marketplace) you have all the legal justification you need to force Google to back down.
What country requires that?
In the US, there's no requirement for a company to honor the claims of prior advertisements for things that they might do in the future for a different product. And even if a company does lie about the features of their product, advertising law does not require a company to change the features of their product to meet those claims. What could be required is a change in the advertising, or a refund for people who bought the devices under the false terms.
But if you advertise a certain side of feature features in a phone three years ago, and sell something completely different next year, that's entirely legal.
It's certainly possible for the same company to create an open platform in addition to a separate platform that is a walled garden.
Microsoft Windows is an open platform that is open to running whatever software you want, while Xbox is a walled garden.
That doesn't mean that Google can fraudulently market an open platform and then close it after driving competing platforms out of the market without running afoul of antitrust law.
However, if Google wants to create a new platform that is a walled garden, as long as they are honest with users about what they are selling, that would be perfectly legal everywhere except the EU.
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This is a massive stretch. What marketing campaign said that?
And even if it did, it’s not like marketing campaigns make claims that last forever.
Red Lobster doesn’t owe you anything because endless crab legs isn’t a thing anymore.
embrace, extend, extinguish
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You keep repeating this argument, but it doesn't hold up upon critical examination.
I already replied here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3209...
(This is before Apple/Google lobbying efforts result in either the death of the bill or a bunch of exceptions allowing companies to do "notarization" or "developer verification".)
Sorry, but when you create an open platform, you are choosing to create a new market where antitrust law will apply.
Google has to live with the consequences of it's decisions.
Open platforms mean more growth more quickly, but they also place restrictions on what you are allowed to do in the future.
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The EU doesn't need a legal justification. They can stop Google but they actually love this because it helps their total surveillance state ideas.
The Android Developer Blog called it "an ID check at the airport which confirms a traveler's identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags."
From the mouths of rubes, I guess. The ID check at the airport has zero to do with safety or security and everything to do with the airlines' business model (no secondary market for tickets), enforced by government.
>The ID check at the airport has zero to do with safety or security and everything to do with the airlines' business model (no secondary market for tickets), enforced by government.
If it's really about protecting "airlines' business model", why did TSA recently start requiring REAL ID to board flights? Were airlines really losing substantial amounts of money through forged drivers licenses that they felt they needed to crack down?
> why did TSA recently start requiring REAL ID
Immigration politics
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I think you still have the right to travel without ID. The TSA may demand it, and may tell you it's legally required, but that doesn't make that true. If you show up at the airport without an ID, you'll still be allowed to fly domestically. Of course, how easy that is probably depends on whether you frame it as a "woops!" or as a "fuck you guys!". They'll put you through extra "security" screening and try to confirm your ID other ways.
"In fact, the TSA does not require, and the law does not authorize the TSA to require, that would-be travelers show any identity documents. According to longstanding practice, people who do not show any identity documents travel by air every day – typically after being required to complete and sign the current version of TSA Form 415 and answer questions about what information is contained in the file about them obtained by the TSA from data broker Accurint…."
https://papersplease.org/wp/2020/05/19/tsa-tries-again-to-im...
https://papersplease.org/wp/2024/03/18/buses-trains-and-us-d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_movement_under_Unit...
This is nonsensical. The minute the government doesn’t check ID to get on a plane that coincides with your ticket, the airline will start doing ID checks before getting on domestic flights just like they do for international flights.
And some airports are now allowing non fliers inside the terminal.
Even hotels force you to verify your ID to check in even though the reservation I’d transferable - just add a guest to your room when you make the reservation.
Nope. Most of the world does the ID check, and it's recommended by the UN guidelines for security reasons.
I know this is side topic but if buying the Android or iPhone hardware gives us hardware we don't control, then what alternatives we realistically have? I do own pinephone (and I was recently reading that they kinda staled with development of new phones hardware), I know about librem.. is there anything else on the market?
LineageOS? /e/OS? ArrowOS? Android has so much momentum that seems like it would be difficult to avoid a fork. I know Waydroid exists, but I'm not sure that's good enough. Ubuntu Touch sounds really cool too, but I've put effort into it with a used Google Pixel 3A and it's not an easy, cheap thing to try out right now. And it's still dependent on binary blobs for drivers, as far as I know. Not a great situation.
Regarding banking apps and things like that, I don't run into to any issues except for not being able to scan checks for deposit on the mobile website. And also I have to have physical credit cards. If you can't do what you need, consider changing to a local credit union which has your interests in mind far more than a for-profit bank.
I've never run into a need for apps for a government purpose, but perhaps I will someday.
I'm sure my situation where I live may be different than your situation where you live.
I don't use an open source fork of Android daily and from what I can tell the best option that exists today.
The only hardware that I know will continue to be open enough for this to be viable in the future is Fairphone. I hope there are others. I would definitely would NOT trust Google Pixel to remain open for the foreseeable future.
Personally, I'm trying to get out of the habit of using my phone anyway, so I might as well have laptop or desktop hardware that can fulfill my needs.
Thank you for taking your time to list all the options!
I have no requirement to use apps other than calls, navigation, something to let me view pdf, take photos and maybe browse HN :) (already a big bunch)
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Probably Linux phones, they are not there yet, but maybe by the time Android becomes an iOS it will be there.
Problem will be with banking apps and such, well you can get an used iphone and in lockdown mode it should be fine even if it reaches EoL.
Bought a used iPhone 7 for a specific project requiring a supported OS (iOS15) and having a hardware security module and the phone worked fine for that but Microsoft Authenticator refused to install below iOS 16 for no obvious reason.
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I hope that F-Droid, the FSF or anything like that will initiate a complaint in US or EU. I would happily give a fund for that purpose.
There's an overarching lesson that FLOSS needs to learn from the last fifteen years:
If it's not copyleft, it's not free. Also, it's more than just a legal classification of IP law, it's an ethos. I don't care how "free" your underlying OS is, if most of the userland is proprietary and the only way to really effectively use the software on consumer hardware is to use a megacorp's implementation of it and to bow to their whims, it might as well be Microsoft Windows.
This is why I always thought Android never really was Linux. Sure, it has a Linux kernel, but that kernel just exists to run a bunch of software in a way that you have no real control over.
This is laying the groundwork for mandatory software. Soon after this browsers and messengers will be required to install tracking components to be included in the app stores or approved for sideloading.
This is how the surveillance blob will get around the huge backlash to Apple's mandatory on-device child abuse scanning, close off any avenues to escape it before re-introducing mandatory on-device spying.
> This logic is flawed: historically, we've seen malware slip through the Play Store—signed and “verified”—several times.
Yeah, check for all the fake sora apps in the play store.
This is a weak argument. If things have slipped through the cracks with someone actively reviewing it, the alternative cant be 'lets not do any checking whatsoever'.
There are better arguments against this that other commenters here have provided (including "my device, my rule") but this isnt a strong argument.
That's the thing, they don't review their apps, and they actively ignore people flagging apps that are scams or otherwise malicious. Much like their ad empire, its all bots and people making money for pretending to care.
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It's not "let's not do any checking whatsoever", it's just "let individual users choose between Google's ineffective checking and alternative app sources that users can trust or not trust with zero involvement from Google".
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That would make sense except they aren't doing any app reviews lol. They're just scanning your government ID. It is a farce.
Yes, it's a very unfriendly decision by Google.
However, I don't think they haven't measured the number of users installing apps outside of the Play store. May be they just don't care about the small % of total users who are a large % here on HN.
This is a part of a bigger trend, Cory Doctorow spoke about 13 years ago in his "The coming war on general computing": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
And this will creep out to the major desktop systems too, Apple is doing it with their stupid "non-verified app" and Windows looks more likely to do so with their "need Microsoft account to login" to windows.
It's unfriendly to developers and power users, but very friendly to the other 99.999% of users.
I used to work for Google, on Android security, and it's an ongoing philosophical debate: How much risk do you expose typical users to in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users? Both are important but at some point the typical users have to win because there are far, far more of them.
The article implies that this move is security theater. It's not. I wasn't involved in this decision at all, but the security benefit is clear: Rate limiting.
As the article points out, Google already scans all the devices for harmful apps. The problem is knowing what apps to look for. Static analysis can catch them, dynamic analysis with apps running in virtual environments can catch them, researchers can catch them, users can report them... all of these channels are taken advantage of to identify bad apps and Google Play Protect (or whatever it's called these days) can then identify them on user devices and warn the users, but if bad actors can iterate fast enough they can get apps deployed to devices before Google catches on.
So, the intention here is to slow down that iteration. If attackers use the same developer account to produce multiple bad apps, the dev account will get shut down, requiring the attackers to create a new account, registered with a different user identity and confirmed with different government identification documents.
Note that in the short term this will just create an additional arms race. In order to iterate their malware rapidly, attackers will also need to fake government IDs rapidly. This means Google will have to get better at verifying the IDs, including, I expect, getting set up to be able to verify the IDs using government databases. Attackers will probably respond by finding countries where Google can't do that for whatever reason. Google will have to find some mitigation for that, and so on.
So it won't be a perfect solution, but in the real world, especially at Google scale, there are no perfect solutions. It's all about raising the bar, introducing additional barriers to abuse and making the attackers have to work harder and move slower, which will make the existing mechanisms more effective.
It's not even about power users. The article describes this pretty well: It is about the fact that this action will destroy or at least severely harm the open source app ecosystem. What I can see is that this already has a chilling effect on app developers releasing apps on F-Droid. You might say why should I care about that when I am one of the 99 % of normal users. But it all comes down to freedom. If you destroy alternatives to the Play Store, you remove the freedom of choice that even the 99 % of users would have if they were willing to switch to proper open source solutions.
Does anyone know if there is a concrete evidence that bespoke measure violates the EU's digital markets act?
> in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users
These are the rights of all the users. Take that perspective.
Remotely pushing a code to billions of devices to lock their baisc function (running code user loads) unless the device owner pay and provide sensitive info is a full-scale global malware attack by itself.
Completely false dichotomy - you could release a separate android channel that would require flashing through fastboot but still be signed, don't require unlocked bootloader and fully pass "Play Integrity".
But those 99.999% of users won't be using F-droid or direct-installs to begin with.
> How much risk do you expose typical users to in the name of preserving the rights and capabilities of the tiny base of power users?
Rights and capabilities are for everyone, even if they're not currently using them due to not being a "power user". They're an important "escape valve": if things get bad enough, normal people become power users out of necessity.
In that case, an ID-gated play store and a developer settings toggle with a scary warning message would serve the same purpose for that 99.999% while leaving the rest minimally affected. Clearly that's not enough for google.
Check Stallman's The Right to Read short story.
Link: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
Meta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_to_Read
This is the beginning of the end of Android.
Google have over-reached.
It is unacceptable to software developers to be unable to install software on their own phones, and this will lead to a successor to Android.
It will take time, but it will now happen.
Very few people care about this change. The current outrage will be a distant memory in a few months. I'm sure fdroid will find a path forward. Folks who want to install custom apps on their phone will still be able to do so, maybe with an extra tedious step in some cases but if you're motivated the changes won't stop you.
> beginning of the end of Android.
You underestimate how much money & effort it takes to make an operating system.
No - I'm not saying it will be soon, or fast. I am saying only it will now come, just as Linux did.
Wouldn't people just fork AOSP? Seems like GrapheneOS has a running start?
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If that actually were the case, the iPhone would've died in 2007.
In reality, most people don't even know what sideloading is. Those are the people who are buying phones and supporting the market for their existence.
The 0.001% of people who want to side load applications onto their phone, can clamor for a new OS all they want, but unless they put the resources in place to make that happen, it won't.
> If that actually were the case, the iPhone would've died in 2007.
But there was Android. If you cared about loading, you could ditch Apple. You had something else to go to.
Now there's nothing.
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My hope is that this lets some more people wake up and finally make Linux on the smartphone a reality.
If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation. When they were working on Ubuntu touch (or whatever their phone version was called), they would show off how cool it was that you could just plug your monitor and input devices into it and boom you’ve got an all in one device.
But who wants that? It’s cool. But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.
> If that ever does happen I really hope they just focus on making a proper phone, not trying to make it a hybrid phone and workstation.
It's not a zero-sum game in that regard. The entire point of Linux phones is to get Linux distros working in phone form-factors. Getting them to work as general-purpose computers is the easier, already finished part. Getting them to work as phones is the harder-part, the new work. Removing the easy, already finished part doesn't make writing the camera drivers, modem-handling software, etc. any easier.
> But I’d rather just have a fully functional phone that happens to be Linux.
Without the "workstation" stuff? That's Android.
You've been able to do this on android since the Motorola Atrix.
I certainly want that. I use DeX all the time. It's amazing.
I'd love to see this. Could the community rally a phone manufacturer with phones at different price points and focus on that? Most projects I've looked at in the past have been as good as dead, or spread across a bunch of outdated or bad phones.
I secretly wish Framework will do this one day.
Yeah, all you need to add is a desktop environment and some kernel drivers that are specific for phone hardware.... except that's what AOSP already is.
Can anyone say exactly what this would mean for F-Droid? For instance, not that I want this to happen but if F-Droid really wanted, they could conceivably get verified developer status.
And then they could offer apps, which (again I don't want this, just asking), could also be distributed if verified. F-Droid would have to be verified and would only be able to distribute apps from developers that are also verified.
And so conceivably you could still install apps from outside the Play store if they're verified. Unless the Play store is administering verification.
I'm not saying that would work, in fact, I think in practice it wouldn't. I'm just trying to play out what that would look like to understand the specifics of how F-Droid is being effectively dismantled. But I'm all ears if someone has a different interpretation about how F-Droid lives through this. It would seem that it would only survive on degoogled phones.
We wrote about what it means for F-Droid at:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45507173
> we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.
Since these are open source apps, couldn't f-droid maintain their own fork of each app with a different application identifier?
It would give Google the ability to shutdown F-Droid at will by baning their account and thus far more power to control what F-Droid publishes and how it operates. However, it seems like anyone could fork an open source app and use their own account and setup their own unique identifier for their fork.
No question this increases Google's power but it doesn't seem like it technically makes it impossible to operate a store like F-Droid.
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Google's requirement for developers to be verified threatens app store F-Droid - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794 - Sept 2025 (564 comments)
If nothing prevents this from happening, then when it does happen, I will make it a point to carry nothing but a laptop and a dumb phone, maybe a hotspot. If I need something from the internet, I will get it before the trip. If I can't get it on the trip, and forgot to beforehand, I will either find another way, or not do whatever it is.
I don't know why I don't do that now, honestly. Sounds pretty interesting.
You don’t because it’s not reasonable. It’s fun to play with (speaking from experience), but it’s not reasonable in day-to-day life. That’s why smartphones are so successful. That’s why we need to actually open platform.
Open platform would be better, I agree. In the meantime until said open platform actually catches up to the current garbage duopoly, I may have no other choice but to be inconvenienced.
Principle > convenience. I am okay with that. Right now, GrapheneOS works properly and doesn't compromise my principles in exchange for the convenience.
Realistically, what can be done to stop this?
In my eyes, Google is violating my rights because I did not agree to them stopping independent installation. I view them pushing this update as criminal vandalism.
A law with more teeth than the EU's Digital Markets Act (which, contrary to popular belief, does not actually require sideloading) could theoretically be passed. The current (pre-lobbying) iteration of the App Store Freedom Act looks pretty good (ctrl+f "security", "safety", "integrity" returns zero results).
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3209...
Realistically speaking, that probably won't happen, though. What can you, yourself do to mitigate the impact?
Install a forked version of Android without Developer Verification. LineageOS, GrapheneOS and CalxyOS are all pretty good options. Stop using any apps with remote attestation via Play Integrity, which will mean sacrificing more and more functionality as time goes on. Try to use mobile sites instead of mobile apps as much as possible. Watch the F-Droid catalog get smaller and smaller until it crumbles completely when it becomes unusable by >80% of Android users.
They saw apple getting away with it under the DMA so they're just doing the same. You can't do anything about it.
People choose Android because they need / want more control over their system. If Google continues to remove that control, they lose the only thing that gives their OS an edge.
Some people do, most choose it because Android phones are a lot less expensive when you buy new (outside of the flagship/newest phones).
The share of users who find this business move to be a deal-breaker is likely small enough for most manufacturers to not care.
Android limits on "installing" software of your choice on your own consumer hardware are the most anti-consumer move yet.
Let's call it what it is. Attack on what ownership of our stuff means.
It's a puzzle to me how Google moves to restrain app install out of its store, while Apple loses in court for similar practices.
This change would make Google's policies in line with the policies Apple has recently implemented to comply with those court orders you're talking about.
A while ago I implemented some little feature I wanted for an open source app, and tested it on my phone. Only Android development I've ever done, a few hours' work: I wasn't going to get certified as an official Android developer for it. With this, I wouldn't be able to do it? Or rather I could, but could only test with the Android Studio emulator or similar?
Similarly if I just wanted to make something for myself, not distribute it at all, I know have to register with this program just to install my thing on my own phone? I don't think even Apple goes that far?
These restrictions won't apply to developer tools afaik. You will still be able to install anything using ADB.
(I'm not defending the practice — Android needs to be separated from Google, and it needs to be done 10 years ago)
No. You can still install apks through ADB, which is how you would do it during development. But you won't be able to distribute it without signing it through google.
If you can't install software on your own device, you don't own it.
You are renting a completely government and corporate controlled piece of hardware.
Agreed, and the only reason I bought a Pixel is because it supports Graphene. But as long as the masses value convenience over privacy and freedom, nothing will change, and Apple/Google will happily keep selling them devices that are now primarily designed to spy on them.
"But as long as the masses value convenience over privacy and freedom, nothing will change, and Apple/Google will happily keep selling them devices that are now primarily designed to spy on them."
When I have taken the time to educate someone on a very personal level about privacy, the person understands the value and will change some of their habits. We can win this.
Man that seems like a long time ago, eh?
As someone who doesn't really care about apps, if I wanted to move away from Android what phones and OSs are worth considering?
Don't know how the Google's actions with affect AOSP. There are few options depending on location / country with base band frequencies.
Murena with e/OS/ [0], Purism with PureOS [1], Volla with Volla OS or Ubuntu Touch [2], and Furei Labs with FuriOS [3].
Those are the companies actually trying to sell a phone versus Pin64 selling a device to tinker with.
Alternative is checking personally managed OSes like postmarketOS [4] and Ubuntu Touch [5].
[0] https://murena.com/ [1] https://puri.sm/ [2] https://volla.online/en/ [3] https://furilabs.com/ [4] https://postmarketos.org/ [5] https://www.ubuntu-touch.io/
PinePhone
https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-beta-edition-with-conve...
> versus Pin64 selling a device to tinker with.
PinePhone Pro sure, but PinePhone works AFAIK. Similar specs as Purism's (though weaker cameras), and 4 times cheaper.
They all died. There were Linux phones until Android and there were some non-Android phones until Android 8 or so, such as Qt Extended, RIM BlackBerry OS, Palm webOS, Mozilla Firefox OS, and Microsoft Windows Phone, to name a few. They all died from numerous footgun wounds as well as pressures from competition.
VoLTE was one of major contributors to the situation, by the way. Only iOS and Android supported voice call on 4G LTE for first 3-5 years, due to it being a huge pile of TBDs and transitional hacks. There were political fights in whether the LTE is to be 4G or it was to be 3.9999G and superseded quickly by a completely separate 4G standard. This meant that companies and consortium that maintained alternative OS could spend unrealistic amount of lobbying and engineering effort trying to get into it, risking investments needed for it, or give up and start procurement process for a white flag. All chose the latter, and we ended up with an iOS/Android duopoly with unprecedented totality.
I've been using Sailfish OS for quite some time, but I don't do all of my computing on the phone. There's quite a high friction for using any of the mainstream Android apps, so usually you have to find an alternative if possible.
I also use Sailfish OS - its not perfect, but useable. :) And the way Android and iOS goes to shit, its current state might already be better than them soon. ;-)
(Sailfish OS is improving over time, if a bit slowly. :) )
You don't really have a choice: it's either Android or Apple iOS.
PostmarketOS, Mobian, and GrapheneOS all seem to be good choices. Or simply not carrying a phone as I often do.
GrapheneOS on a Pixel
Let's see what will the future of Graphene be, since Google is not publishing the device tree anymore for Pixel devices...
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It's kind of ironic that you have to actually give Google money in order to not use Android. I'm still amazed that there's no Graphene support for any other device.
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Does anyone have a rough estimate for how many installation of GrapheneOS there are?
This will shape the future of computing with how Apple being treated as the reference for the whole industry. (I know this is Google here. But our reference devices are iDevices that was unfortunately always locked in the Apple provisioned codesign)
Our “pocket” computers are locked in. The next computing platform will be more wearable such as AR glasses. We’re expected to have 3 players in the upcoming iteration - Apple, Google. Meta due to vivid services needed for valuable glasses services. Meta already shows how you don’t really own the device by what’s running on it. It’ll be very sad if next generations most used form of computing will be able to run only border-controlled software.
I have this profound disgusting feeling when I think I'm going to have to ask Google to validate which app I am allowed to install on the phone I paid freaking money to get !
This is not about open source, the government being able to ban apps, or anything else but a principle.
I'm not a child and Google is definitely not an authority respectable enough to tell me what I can't install. They have lied, been sued countless times, had to pay billions of fines,..
At this point, there are 2 alternatives : iphone, grapheneos (don't even start with Linux phone).
Iphone suck just as bad on that matter but at least the software is more suited to professionals, it's not as half ass done as Google software.
Grapheneos, it runs just fine 99% of the time but these last 1% can be so annoying. Like how they disable face unlock, or how some apps refuse to work because of play integrity.
My last hope is that the eu will come once again to the rescue and bring the mfcker at Google who came up with this idea back to earth.
That or ban Google Android version and make an European Android alternative funded and developed by a consortium of tech companies that want to sell phone in Europe.
After all, Europe is even a more interesting market than the usa.
I was a big proponent of the nexus phones and Google's efforts in the space, but I am hundred percent not an android fan anymore.
There's a study on positive or destructive workers, from a business management pov. The finding was that the "bad" employees and the "good" are often the same people: a "good" employee scorned becomes the worst type of employee.
I think Google will be discovering some variant of this from their previous fandom, and it will be too late.
You seem to be framing this as if it were a business decision to curtail competition. I and likely the team pushing these changes only see the security benefits for users through these changes. People have tinted lenses to assume malice when Google does things, but if you've actually ever been close to the decision making process internally it's never anything close to what people seem to imagine. People are overestimating how problematic these changes will be in practice.
Too late for whom though? I suspect it's not Google. The only companies with enough capital to take them on at their own game are somehow even worse, although admittedly the gap is getting narrower by the second.
And yeah, giants occasionally fall suddenly. But mostly just in the software world. Phones require extensive hardware and software knowledge, and increasingly also require playing nice with carriers/TLA government agencies.
Back in "ye olden days" (TM) sideloading was just called "running software". I think it's very unfortunate that the authors of the article propagate this "sideloading" framing.
Sounds like we need either a viable alternative or a next thing.
The next thing will probably be AR glasses and we could use some alternatives to Meta and Google and Apple.
I really would love to get rid of everything related to Google, Microsoft and Apple. Too bad I am completely depending on them. Business wise and privately. I wish I would wake up tomorrow with a Linux phone with no crippleware, no notifications, no crappy animations, no limits, no nothing.
Of course as rubbish as this is, it could spawn a bunch of new commercial app stores and trigger competition there.
My understanding is side loading is only limited if play services are installed and Google mandates it.
This may give some room to some smaller phone makers to launch less encumbered phones.
I think F-Droid will have to go the ADB route, maybe have a desktop interface to wirelessly ADB install APKs to your devices... could be an awesome way to manage apps on multiple devices! I currently have a powershell script to do all that myself.
You can already bootstrap an ADB connection to your own device without any extra hardware via Shizuku. Won't be long until F-droid releases a plugin that does the installation via Shizuku.
If users are drawn to the "tree of the knowledge of adb install" then your first assumption should be that the menu in the walled garden is unsatisfactory, not the designs of a serpent.
Let's make life harder for the only mobile app store (F-Droid) that hasn't had any malware on it since it's inception - someone at Google probably.
I imagine custom ROMs would be able to work around this restriction, but I wonder if simply rooting the phone would also allow you to switch it off?
Yes, this verification will be implemented in the OS but not in the TEE, so rooting does give you the ability to affect it.
But Google is working hard to make sure important apps won't work anymore due to their "Play Integrity" crap.
The Play Store should be taken away from Google and setup as a non profit to facilitate serving copies of software people upload.
Android is signalling that users don't own their phone anymore.
Maybe there will be options arriving in the market to re-introduce this concept.
with all these folding phones and e-ink mobile sized e-readers having gone through several generations, I'm beginning to think the next big kickstarter[0] is a dumb e-ink phone/wifi modem connected as a 5g modem to an amoled linux tablet.
[0] No royalties required if you pick up my "fantastic" idea, just send me a free device
I just wish BlackBerry went in a different direction. If during the early-mid 2010s they decided to dedicate to open-source and privacy-first, as well as keeping their flagship QWERTY format with the optimized BlackBerryOS, they could still be around serving a particularly large niche in the smartphone market: Those who use their phone for communication and utility over entertainment.
Maybe they can make a comeback. If anyone at BlackBerry is reading this, just do it, please and thank you.
It's sad that basically anybody can type faster on a 15-year-old blackberry than on the latest and greatest touchscreen-keyboard phone.
It's logical, and comes down to accuracy and comfort. It's the same reason why mechanical keyboards are best on desktop, not those silly flat Apple butterfly keyboards.
What I'm sad about is the fact that the QWERTY format was completely abandoned to cater to the entertainment-focused users on Android and iOS. Those are also the people who "don't care about privacy" and are fine with walled gardens, as long as their TikTok, Facebook and Netflix work.
Is typing on a touchscreen phone really that difficult for people? I did a Monkeytype test just now on my iPhone. I got 50WPM in the 30 second test. For comparison, I get about 100WPM when I type on a regular computer keyboard.
I feel like getting 50% typing speed isn't so bad, and I doubt I would get a lot better than that with physical buttons. Generally I'd rather have more screen real estate.
That said, I definitely prefer physical buttons for games.
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And I was willing to give BlissOS a try as a summer project. Guess Android just became less interesting for hackers in gener.
Bummer because I want a small phone, but it sounds like my phone of the future may be a laptop.
Google has made a terrible decision and their justification for doing this is just laughable. Already right now, if a user wants to install an unverified app, they have to explicitly allow it through settings. They could have moved this option in to the developer settings feature to make it harder for normal people to sideload but still allow developers to sideload. Also Play Store itself is plagued with apps with severe vulnerabilities.
Google has lost its consumers for good. This is really sad. I have no reason to buy an android anymore when I upgrade my phone in the future. At least Apple does gaslight us
i am just waiting on the same thing that happened with sony and geohot to happen to google as well. blocking sideloading will annoy some very smart and maybe dangerous people
Most consumers DON'T CARE. They want their phones to access Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, Bluesky, their banking, shopping, and food order apps, etc. If anything they'd be glad to know that Google is stopping entire classes of malware at the source. This is an anti-techie move, not an anti-consumer move. Only techies care about being able to run any software you want on a device you own. Most people don't really want to own a computer because owning one means you are responsible for administrating it, and that's well beyond normies' capability and/or well outside the things they want to spend time or energy fucking with. They just want access to what the computer enables.
Continuing to bang on this drum has "less space than a Nomad, lame" energy. Except it's political, so you sound even more like an autistic loon. Start thinking, techies. Not everybody is remotely like you. 99% of Google's customer base don't care about this, and Google may have actually increased Android's value to end users.
> Most consumers DON'T CARE
Why is this argument even a thing?
They want to use Facebook, Instagram, TikTok... The exact services that wouldn't exist in the first place if there wasn't for the open neutral Internet, something they didn't care about too.
from what i understand:
- if you compile from source and deploy via adb nothing changes
- if you use a closed source binary, the identity of the owner becomes mandatory
so the issue is anonymously published closed source software?
> if you compile from source and deploy via adb nothing changes
That's not how I understand it. Do you have a source?
"Starting in September 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices."
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-...
> Android Studio is unaffected because deployments performed with adb, which Android Studio uses behind the scenes to push builds to devices, is unaffected.
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> anonymously published closed source software
Yes, like the software for my ebike conversion kit for which I only have the APK. I have vetted the software and would like to install it. If Google blocks that, then fuck them.
> - if you use a closed source binary, the identity of the owner becomes mandatory
So I can't just build an apk and distribute to others? What's the process for providing identity?
Paying Google $25 for the privilege of giving them a picture of your face and license to save in their cloud.
My next phone is gonna be a Linux phone.
It's time to buy a top tier phone and disable updates when it comes into effect and hope in the following years this madness will resolve.
it's always hilarious (and there's a lot of this going on right now) when major players eliminate themselves from the competition, while deluding themselves that they've eliminated the competition.
Meh, I can still install what I want via adb. It's probably a good thing most people won't be able to click a link and have a new program installed by an anonymous person. Especially in an ecosystem where .apks are passed around manually
does anyone know if this affects lineage os or are they able to work around the madness?
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Why having your own website is essential
Need something to view, edit and serve it through.
The way Google is going, you might as well just have Apple and fully embrace consumer hostility.
As with manifest v3, Google is once again misusing their position as a source of open standards to benefit their adware business. Hopefully the EU fines them once again.
A weird hill to choose to die on given that in practice it's not really a meaningful percentage of people that are using adblockers and the negative PR they get from these oversteps is massive.
Didnt EU rule that it was OK for Apple to do, and Google is just just mirroring that?
I believed the EU specifically ruled that Apple's rules which include this are NOT ok. And they're currently fighting Apple about it. Unless I missed something.
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Dare I say it, I think we're being too harsh on Google here.
When you own a massively successful consumer product like Android, which is foundational to users' lives, you have an obligation to your users to keep them safe*. Sometimes you will have to choose between protecting users who don't know what they are doing at the expense of limiting users who know what they are doing. In this case, they have chosen to err on the side of the former.
I get it. It's OK to not like this development, especially if you use a lot of sideloaded apps. However, if you call this "anti-consumer", then perhaps you and Google have different notions of who the consumers are.
All said and done, Android/Pixel is still the most open mobile platform. Users are still free to install other AOSP-based OSes such as Graphene OS, which have no such restrictions on sideloading.
PS: I'm a former Google employee. I don't think I am a Google shill. I worked on mobile security, but I was not involved on this matter.
* I am using "safety" as a catch all for privacy and security as well.
AOSP is starting to be locked down. Google's idea of promoting safety is charging developers for recognition. When there's a profit incentive involved, no, we are not being "too harsh"
Almost all of the pushback I have seen is on the notion of "developer registration", not the cost. That's what I was responding to.
I don't know how much it costs. But if there's any pushback that it costs too much, my comment is not about that.
> Android/Pixel is still the most open mobile platform
There are 2 options in this space (practically). Being better than Apple, who is explicit about the fact that they own every iPhone on the planet, is not a flex.
Do you think Apple is being reckless not doing the same thing on MacOS, Microsoft on Windows? Is the population too stupid to be permitted general purpose computers?
>Is the population too stupid to be permitted general purpose computers?
I'm strongly against this Android change (for a simple reason written below) but the answer to this is a resounding yes! The general population is a complete security disaster with unsigned software! The latest generations being brought up within abstracted mobile ecosystems are no improvement either on that front (probably worse).
That said - and I think this is a key point in this debate - sideloading apps is already a fringe part of the Android ecosystem. The vast majority of average Android users will never interface with this functionality. Well there is still obviously a security risk as with any time unsigned software is offered, it doesn't seem to me to be a major issue in the ecosystem. This is clearly about control, not security. Let's say there is more antitrust action and Google loses more control over their preferred forced storefront monopoly within the ecosystem. With this change, at least according my understanding of it, they are still the arbiter of what is allowed on the platform and not even if an app comes from another app store.
No, I am not flexing. I am just stating a fact.
FWIW, I am also pissed that there are only two mainstream options.
> …perhaps you and Google have different notions of who the consumers are.
A relatively small percentage of HN users have empathy for people who haven't the faintest idea how their gadgets work and no curiosity about learning that. It can seem inconceivable.
I agree with you that normal people deserve safety when using their most intimate device, and that backdoors that can give technical people unfettered access will ultimately be abused by bad actors. I wish the world didn't work this way, but it's the one we live in.
> have empathy for people who haven't the faintest idea how their gadgets work and no curiosity about learning that.
I sincerely hope that a lot of people are actually better than how the stereotypes may make one think. Empathy (or lack of it) doesn't change the issue: users are deprived of choice and forced to go along a corporate decision, whenever it benefits them or not.
Ultimately, it all boils down to lack of informed consent and power/voice disparity between casual users and large corporations, especially when the choice is limited (and we have a de-facto duopoly). What you're seeing here is users expressing their dissatisfaction with a major decision that goes against their interests and that they had no say in. Have some empathy for those folks too.
I'm pretty sure most people who are unhappy about the news don't want to harm anyone and find no enjoyment if someone is harmed by lacking informedness. I'm very confident there are ways to present the issue and give a choice in a manner that is comprehensible to anyone, without requiring any technical knowledge. Every competent adult should be able to decide if they want to risk a thief gaining access to all their accounts at the benefit of ability to have extended control over their phone. Or be unable to install applications not blessed by the vendor, at the benefit of vendor promising to keep them safe from malware. I might not do the best job here, but I strongly believe that such things can be explained to anyone regardless of their life choices.
That's not what Google is doing, and their disrespect for user autonomy should not be confused for a lack of empathy towards those who don't understand computers.
Consider this framing: there's a controversy whenever it's acceptable that one could be punished for their choices on how their devices behave. I.e. whenever users willing to have better control over their devices should be punished by a refusal to access a lot of popular apps, sometimes even resulting in social awkwardness. I'm sure that empathetic people can see how this can feel unfair.
I have empathy for them, that's precisely why I made them much more secure by recommending mobile Firefox with uBlock :)
Yes, these big corporations are truly benevolent entities who are only looking out for the common man, and us software engineers are out of touch and "lack empathy".
It couldn't possibly be a frustration and concern that this is blatantly anti-competitive and serves to make Google considerably more money and leaves us with little/no options for people who actually know how to use a computer.
Frankly I think the security argument is largely a smokescreen to avoid discussions of anti-trust.
Let's take this to the logical extreme: I can make my phone even more secure if I pound a nail through it so that it doesn't turn on anymore. The phone is really secure now; it is impossible to install any malware on it, no one can install a bitcoin miner or track my credit cards or anything.
Even better, how about we replace the concept of "smartphone" with a glossy print of a Pixel phone that people can carry in their pocket? It would be lighter and completely secure as there would be no way to run any software on it.
Obviously I'm being farcical here, but ultimately I think there's a spectrum of security, and generally speaking these kinds of "security increases" end up making the phone less useful. Sideloading apps is already disabled by default. Most users aren't going to enable it; really the only people who are going to enable this are nerds who want to sideload stuff, and there's a strong selection bias towards people who know how to take care of themselves in the first place.
Also, frankly I don't really buy the "security" argument anyway. These companies aren't selfless benevolent entities who care so much about us, they are for-profit enterprises. If all apps need to be approved by and purchased through Google, then they can extract more money from users, which wouldn't be true with a side-loaded app store (e.g. what Amazon tried).
I currently run an iPhone, but I don't like how locked down it is and I have considered moving back to Android because of that, but now I'm not really seeing the point. I could of course install Lineage or Graphene or something else but that's considerably more effort.
I wish Ubuntu Touch had gained traction.
If I buy a Google Pixel device then I AM a consumer. You don't have to choose, you could release a separate device for those who know what they're doing, just like Mozilla releases a separate edition of Firefox that doesn't require signatures.
And yes, I while I can still install some alternative OS on my older Pixel (now Google has stopped providing device trees for the newer ones which I therefore won't buy), Google constantly tries to make this as insufferable as possible with their "Play Integrity" crap.
> now Google has stopped providing device trees for the newer ones which I therefore won't buy
Yeah, that sucks. I don't know if they made any official statement on that. I hope they will continue releasing device trees. It's a feather in their cap that the best mobile device to use for de-Googling so far was a Pixel device (with alt OSes). I hope they won't lose that distinction.
If you want to install software on your Microsoft Windows computer, it has to be signed by a verified developer, otherwise you get an overridable warning that the developer cannot be verified, the software may contain malware etc.
If you want to install software on you MacOS machine, the same thing applies. It must come from a verified developer with an apple account, otherwise you get a warning and must jump through hoops to override. As of macos15.1 this is considerably more difficult to override.
If you want to install iOS apps, the apps have to be signed by a verified developer. Theres no exceptions.
I just dont see a future where being able to create and publish an app anonymously is going to be supported.
Becoming a verified developer is a PITA, and can take a while or be impossible (i.e. getting a DUNS number if you're in a sanctioned country might be not at all possible) but at the same time, eliminating the ability of our devices from running any old code it downloads and runs is a huge safety win.
I'm okay with overridable warnings, having to open system settings to override the verification, etc. It's a "huge safety win" for the 80% of users who don't really know what they're doing, security wise. But not for me.
I won't be using any OS that doesn't allow me to step outside its walled garden, if I have any alternatives at all. With macOS it's quite simple - the second they won't allow apps from unverified/unsigned developers, I'm switching to Linux. On mobile, I might as well switch to iOS, since I'm not really sure what else Android offers anymore that's so compelling, other than being able to install apps directly. And then I'll just wait for a Linux phone or something.
Or you can try not updating Android or continue using a device already EOL. Can't have your cake and eat it too on releases and security patches.
There is a world of difference between "the OS throws up a bunch of warnings" and "the OS won't let you run unsigned software"
But Apple will change those "warnings" into straight-up lies, and fail to mention the user can override them, and hide those overrides in non-discoverable places:
Whenever I try to open an unverified app, this popup comes up saying "[AppName] Not Opened" "Apple could not verify [AppName] is free of malware that may harm your Mac or compromise your privacy." Then there's only two options to either press "Done" or "Move to Trash." - https://old.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1ekv55h/cant_right_cli...
Your only option is to click on OK button, which won’t open the app. So how do you do it? - http://www.peter-cohen.com/2016/12/how-to-open-a-mac-app-fro...
Apple knowingly falsely claiming unsigned apps are "damaged": https://appletoolbox.com/app-is-damaged-cannot-be-opened-mac...
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> I just dont see a future where being able to create and publish an app anonymously is going to be supported.
This is strongly needed if surveillance laws like Chat Control are not to be trivially bypassed. This way applications that don't offer governments the required surveillance features can be banned and the developpers can be sued. Not looking forward to that.
I'd be fine if it was just any old code "it" downloads. The problem is that it's any old code "I" download too.
I dunno man, it doesn't feel like a "huge safety win" that my computer has to check with a singular US tech company before it will let me use any software on it.
That's only sorta how it usually works. The developer has to check with a singular US tech company before they can sign the software they've given you.
Except yeah, the way this android stuff works is closer to that way. Instead of Google giving out a key for signing, they instead ask for one and tie a developer to a namespace, so yeah, I guess your Android phone has to check whether or not that namespace is "in the clear"
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> eliminating the ability of our devices from running any old code it downloads and runs is a huge safety win
No, this is just false. There's numerous, well-documented instances of malware making it past gatekeepers security checks. This move is exclusively about Google asserting control over users and developers and has nothing to do with security or safety.
The only "huge safety win" comes from designing more secure execution models (capabilities, sandboxing, virtual machines) that are a property of the operating system, not manual inspection by some megacorp (or other human organization).
Thats a false equivalency. I didnt say that software was safe because its been checked. Just that at the least, one can somewhat figure out where the software came from.
Getting a DUNS number obviously doesn't make it so that you cant publish malware. It just provides a level of traceability/obstacle that slows down the process of distributing malware.