Comment by jeduardo
4 days ago
The "protective waiting period" of 24h is what kills it. For people like me, who rely more and more every day on OSS apps not necessarily in the Play Store, installing a new phone will mean waiting a full day for almighty Google to allow me to do so. It reminds me of the same annoyance of carrier phone unlocks.
I wonder how this will play out in the phones coming out of the Motorola+GrapheneOS partnership.
I'm genuinely interested in proposals for other ways to differentiate knowledgeable users enabling side loading for reasons like OSS, vs naive users enabling it at the instruction of scammers to install malware.
The one time per device (not per app/install) is annoying, but seems like a reasonable tradeoff between preventing bad installs and allowing legit installs. I can't think of any obviously better ways.
I realise some disagree with the entire premise. I think refusing to accept the reason given doesn't advance the discussion though and I am very interested in what a better experience that is trying to solve the same problems could look like.
If you can get someone to do all these steps, you can get someone to wait 24 hours as well.
We use Android based devices internally with apps which aren't signed. I've had way too much trouble with Google flagging an internal app as problematic and then getting no where with Google "support" when we still used Google play.
The 24 hour wait is especially problematic because we often simply factory reset a device and preload it of there is any form of trouble.
This is just a power grab to lock down the ecosystem more. And ironically this seems to because of the Epic lawsuit. Google is now aligning with the absolute minimum they saw Apple needed to implement.
This was never about safety. It was all about control. Desktop OSes have always allow installing any softwares and the world is still spinning. Not even macos overreach this hard.
There's no solutions because they specifically crafted the problem to not be solvable. No amount of compromises will stop them from advancing further.
I think Google is trying to solve the problem at the wrong level - people do not really understand their computing devices enough to understand the risks, they never had to learn or were taught how to use such devices, they were only told it's easy and to not ask questions. The interfaces are designed in a way that allows them to get by with almost no understanding of anything. Which is why such solutions may also be bypassed by a determined attacker. Such scams only really expose this fact. So there is no good way to differentiate between the two groups.
My solution is educating about smartphones and computers first. Not in an in-depth way, but people need to understand what "application", "verified" means and what are the risks. I think android cleaned up the abstraction enough to make this possible.
Being able to tell if an app came from a trusted company or not is a good thing, but I would rather such a solution be managed in an OS-independent way, not controlled by Google. Applications not authenticated by a company should not be second-tier citizens, but there should be a clear warning (and the users should already know the difference before even seeing this warning).
I think the scams and phishing also expose another important problem that nobody tried to tackle yet - you can't authenticate calls, sms messages or emails. There is no good way of telling if it's actually your bank calling you, or if it's just a scammer.
In the end, we also need to accept that not all scams can be prevented, at some point if someone is calling as a friend of your family member, and is asking to urgently transfer money to an unknown account, and you fall for this... I really can't think of a technological measure that would've helped, it's only you and your common sense.
> My solution is educating about smartphones and computers first.
98% of people literally do not care and/or are too dumb to understand. You could force them at gunpoint to sit in the education class, and give them a simple basic quiz afterwards, and they'd get half the answers wrong. They will continue to not even read what's on their screen, and just click the big highlighted button every time they see one.
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A minuscule amount of nerds being slightly annoyed is definitely worth when it hinders scammers from ruining a persons live.
There's no way this is really about scammers. I have never heard of scammers pushing sideloaded apps upon their victims in order to carry out their scams.
Would welcome evidence to the contrary. Is this truly a threat model that's seen in the wild?
My gut says no because social engineering is about hijacking legitimate, first-party processes. Scammers attack login credentials, MFA flows, and use first-party apps to maintain access (think remote control software like TeamViewer). These apps come from the Play Store, not from meticulously curated collections like F-Droid, and not from somebody pressuring you to sideload an APK.
And if scammers decide to use sideloading as an attack vector -- then like all the other security gates that can be defeated via social engineering, I expect they will find an end-run around this one as well. Either on a technical basis, or by social-engineering users into bumbling past it and on to the next stage of the scam.
Build an idiot-proof system and society will build a better idiot. And yeah, the rest of us only wind up slightly annoyed, _for now_, until Google tightens their grip further on some other flimsy pretext.
>There's no way this is really about scammers. I have never heard of scammers pushing sideloaded apps upon their victims in order to carry out their scams.
I also never got targeted by pig butchering scams[1], and neither did my immediate friends/family, so I guess those must not exist either?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_butchering_scam
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> I have never heard of scammers pushing sideloaded apps upon their victims in order to carry out their scams.
Maybe not scammers, but an abusive partner could sideload an application on your phone to spy on you. I've seen that before within my relatives.
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It won't make a dent in scammers' revenue.
No, it is not. This is moving the goalposts. The original issue is developer verification. No appreciable harm prevention can or will come from forcing devs to identify themselves.
That's because most fraud uses social tactics and LEGITIMATE tools/software.
Impinging on my property rights cannot and will not protect fraud victims.
oh to be young and naive...