Answering Questions About Android Developer Verification

If that goes away, might as well use apple's walled garden. There is no point for android to exist if freedom goes away.

People become willing to do things when you throw them out in the cold that they wouldn't do when you were still supplying the bread and circuses, and those people they don't like? It's because they're stubborn and they actually care and they know how to build things, isn't it?

Sure the Play store was dominant when they started their own store. Yet companies tend to have excellent success if they control the OS on the device.

They could have offered no commission for 5 years, or some such.

Does anyone reading this know if the contract they had to sign with Google, to have the Play store pre-installed, reduced their ability to compete?

I mean look at the whole Epic thing. They could have offered them commission free use of the store, and used that to draw users in.

It's like they weren't trying.

There's nothing to stop them, and absolutely no reason to think they won't take away adb sideloading in the near future.

What if F-Droid distributes an app Google or its US overlords deems dangerous or illegal? Will they block and/or revoke that signature, thus taking down F-Droid in its entirety?

and they will be removed by play protect.

I have been running Graphene on a Pixel for a while now and I don't think Linux phones are a viable alternative. The vast majority of Android apps just work on Graphene, and there are millions of them. The UI experience is polished, everything just works with the exception of apps that require Google Play Integrity. And of course these projects aren't affected by Google's restrictions on sideloading.

But no, I think in the case when android is no option any more, I will seriously reconsider if we peaked on some enshitification with smartphones.

Maybe no smartphone or Linux phones will be more interesting for some time for me then.

I agree, it isn't and shouldn't be, an industry self-regulating org is needed, like the CA/B forum for browsers. Maybe one day we can transition to that.

> Yes, and if Google had shown that it's capable of identifying and rejecting malicious code distributed via its own app store,

You're making the opposite point there, they can't do a good job at scanning their appstore, so requiring devs to id themselves is a better option, so that anyone publishing malicious code might risk real-world criminal penalties. That's a better deterrent than google scanning code.

> If you want any regular user to be able to install your code, no matter how small the audience, you'll need to first give your identity to Google, and obtain a (paid[1]?) license. So the restrictions do apply to "a private group of people" too.

This applies to google certified phones, and such phones at the time of certification are sold to the public, not to a private audience. Private audiences need to buy non-google-certified phones (which exist). The question of google certification is one you need to have with phone vendors not Google. Samsung can opt to avoid google certification just fine. They have every right to demand that a phone with their stamp on it can only run apps by devs they authenticated, this is the price of their seal of approval.

> Many technical users of Android consider it to be a general purpose computing platform, and they want to retain the freedom to install and run whatever software they trust.

Yeah, for example I have an x86 android VM, it won't be affected because it isn't google certified. If you came up with a custom tablet or laptop that runs android, you can load random apps on it just fine.

> Google should focus their supposed concerns about regular user's safety on the user-hostile apps..

They can do multiple things, but this helps with that as well. the dev making user hostile apps now has to use his real name and their reputation will now follow them forever.

https://puri.sm/posts/the-danger-of-focusing-on-specs/

> charges way too much

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21656355

> questionable business ethics

They retrospectively changed their return policy in order to not get bankrupt. AFAIK everything is find now. I'm a happy owner of Librem 5 btw.

Yes, it currently builds on top of Hallium. Anyone who thinks this should be a sticking point has their head in the sand; the device and effort is how you get a usable ecosystem rolling.

Sure, it’s possible they could retroactively ban your app, but they could do that without signing too. Just ban com.anonymous.newpipe or whatever the package name is. The signing doesn’t really change this.

I understand this is a controversial position and I’m not in favor of this change, I just want to understand where the real differences are in an impartial way.

Of course Linux is an exception but it is also not widely used by consumers like Android and the other OSes I listed are.

Thought: Maybe we can organise and collectively hire this PR team to get Google, other big tech, and our governments, to look bad... And get shit done that way... If 2025 is the year of the PR spin, surely the only counter-measure is counter-spin?

Edit: Hold on, I think I just re-invented the concept of a political party.

Maybe that's something employers shouldn't do, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a reality and google is overstepping with this change.

But, the biggest trap that we can easily expect is that a lot of apps like banking apps will use Google API to check that they can only run on devices with the check for signatures. Same as the check for rooted devices.