Comment by nine_k
1 day ago
I see zero trouble as long as it requires no additional identification, no additional payment, and no mandatory time limit for the sideloaded apps.
That is, fine by me. I can wait for 24 hours once in a few years when I acquire a new mobile phone.
You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.
Lay users use Play Store.
Users who use F-Droid are already not as lay. If you distribute stuff that Play Store would ban, your users are likely not as lay, too.
Yes, it's inconvenient, but I see it as a good-faith attempt to limit exposure of lay users to scams, not some power grab.
Those developers will pay $25 for identity verification and have no issues.
Unless they do something google doesn't like, or trip one of their many automated systems that ban them without recourse. Or they are compelled to revoke a key by a government.
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Drivers license leaks are surging.
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There are exactly two groups of people who sideload APKs:
* people who know what they're doing
* people who are being victimized
Why would you do all that to install an app in a device that you own? It's bollocks.
Because grandmas all over the world are getting swindled by scam apps.
Look, I can't locally install a web extension I wrote on an open-source Firefox browser, because security. I have to install a Developer Edition, or get the extension reviewed and signed by Mozilla, for the very same reasons of thwarting scammers. Is this stifling, or is it making my browser not mine? Is anybody making a big deal out of that?
The world we inhabit is not always friendly. It has a ton of determined and sophisticated bad actors, and a lot of people with less technical savvy than you and me. We have to deal with that, instead of being cantankerous.
It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming. Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
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