It means the safeguard is not part of AOSP. It ships as a closed component that Google can narrow, gate, or remove in any Play Services update, with no Android version bump, no OEM coordination, no user consent beyond the usual auto-update. "Open platform with an escape hatch" is load-bearing in the PR; "closed escape hatch bolted onto an open kernel" is what's actually shipping.
The second tell is timing. It's five months from enforcement and the flow has not appeared in any beta, dev preview, or canary build. We're being asked to treat a blog post and UI mockups as a functional guarantee. No other platform change of this scope lands without a shipping preview this late, and Google knows it.
The third piece most devs skim past: registration requires uploading evidence of your private signing key. Whatever you think of the verification program in principle, that specific requirement changes the threat model of every Android key in existence, including the ones protecting apps people already depend on.
"Sideloading still works" is only true in the narrow sense that some ceremony remains. The mechanism protecting that ceremony is owned by the party with the strongest incentive to eventually close it.
Enable Developer Mode ↗ by tapping the software build number in About Phone seven times
In Settings > System, open Developer Options and scroll down to “Allow Unverified Packages.”
Flip the toggle and answer a scare screen confirming that you are not being coerced
Enter your device unlock pin/password
Restart your device
Wait 24 hours
Return to the unverified packages menu at the end of the security delay
Scroll past additional scare screen warnings and select either “Allow temporarily” (seven days) or “Allow indefinitely.”
On the next scare screen, confirm that you understand the risks.
You can now install unverified packages on the device by tapping the “Install anyway” option in the package manager.Are you that zoomer brained to not be able to wait a day to install your APK?
What is the source for this claim? I can believe it, but I haven't seen where the claim actually comes from, and it doesn't seem to be mentioned in Google's announcements.
Put simply, If I were to install plain AOSP and F-Droid would I be able to continue installing apps normally?
Anyway, I did my part, basically I only use FDroid. I filled this out: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfN3UQeNspQsZCO2ITk...
>Combat astroturfing: when you encounter suspect posts on community forums and social media in support of the policy (“Well, actually…”), challenge them and do not be shy.
Someone contact Dang, because this is now allowed. I have been suspicious HN has actively supported astroturfers over the years for some sort of financial or mutually beneficial gain.
Anyway I basically changed to web apps. They are much easier to deal with and develop.
If you haven't searched/browsed F-Droid in the last few years, do it. You'll likely be pleasantly surprised.
Video games on F-Droid are how Android games should be. They have the spirt: No ads, no micro transactions, etc..
Kids educational games are the same. I have been using those games only for years and I've had 0 issues. Playstore games, you get an update and now your progress is frozen unless you pay.
Guitar tuner? same
File explorer, image viewer, etc... Same
Everything: same
The ones I like: Breakout 71, Chess, Word Maker, Word Tracer, Roboyard, FaFa Runner (short but briefly fun), Minesweeper (Privacy Friendly), Simon Tatham's Puzzles, SuperTuxKart, Tux Rider.
What is perfectly reasonable and rational is to only respond to clearly written arguments with some evidence of thought and time invested in them, and to consider others to be too low-effort or spammy to invest time in responding to. But guess what? Real humans spam for free, they're mostly not paid to do so by the PRC or George Soros.
Is it? I can't name another social media site that is simultaneously more ubiquitous than HN and bereft of any anti-spam measures.
Here you go: https://eff.org, https://edri.org, https://noyb.eu
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=eff.org
I'll admit that my cynicism is in no small part to having seen Android team members at G carrying around iPhones. It kills me to think that the bad parts of Apple are so interwoven into Android through cultural assimilation.
We went to some of the museums and as we were taking pics, the difference in color accuracy were dismal.
The Google phone was much, much, worse. I think google used to be known for their good photography and I was very happy with my earlier pixel 6. But something happened.
I'm sorry to say, but when it comes to photos and videos I think the iphone is now much better than the pixel phones.
Not only that but theres a lot of things that are easier to do when you're inside the apple ecosystem. Particularly in countries with high iphone usage.
I think Google has dropped the ball hard, and yeah, people working in android use iphones, people working in the google watch use apple watch.
The latest iPhone takes shockingly good photos. It's not a full frame mirrorless by any stretch, but it's really in another league when it comes to mobile photography.
It’s more like Android is worse so they don’t want to use it. Dogfooding is good, of course, but if they don’t force them to do it, they will naturally choose the best phone. Which is not an Android.
My parents use Android devices and I manage them. With every iteration, Apple went to the way of PalmOS' refined flows as much as possible, and Android became what Windows CE aspired to be. A complex multi-layer wafer you can't understand which layer comes from where, and it's all different and non-standard between vendors.
Not the least, Android is mobile land of mini tools you have to install to be able to have a power-user friendly platform. Reminds me my old Windows days where I had to install utilities half day to be able to make the installation usable the way I want.
We definitely need a true alternative on the market, preferably open, to balance things out and to free everyone from the duopoly. The political pressure that is needed is not to “keep” Android open, but to ensure that governments and institutions don't double down on the existing duopoly. Ensure that interoperability standards are in place, and don't lock people into the existing big tech platforms/solutions.
I've given up on cell phone software, but I wish cell phone hardware were better. I'm okay with a processor that isn't the latest and greatest, as long as it isn't in so-old-it-draws-watts-at-idle PinePhone territory, but fast processors seems to be all that phone manufacturers care about. They cut corners everywhere else, precluding the headphone ports, expandable storage, replaceable batteries, infrared transmitters, and physical buttons that made older phones much more useful, and they not only make the screens skinnier, but they literally cut off the corners. I want a nice uninterrupted at least 9:16 aspect ratio, if not higher.
</boomer-rant>
By the time the technical mechanism lands, the framing has been prepared for a decade. The 24-hour cooldown, the seven taps, the three scare screens all _feel_ proportional to the danger the language has been implying. That's not an accident, that's the policy working as designed.
There has long been a culture of deliberately making the installation of certain types of free and libre software needlessly complex and using deviancy-coded language simply because it makes the in-group feel cool and elite.
This whole idea of "sideloading" and related terminology being Google FUD only came about in the past couple of years. For the decade before it was people on xda-developers deliberately throwing words like that around because they wanted to prove they were true 1337 h4xx0rz.
</millenial-rant>
This is inaccurate. The enforcement is through Google Mobile Services. The article fails to point out that some manufacturers build versions/forks of Android that do not include GMS, but these are still technically Android.
If you want to develop an app for more than a miniscule fraction of Android devices, you need Google's blessing.
Somewhere in the range of 25%-30% of Android devices (1-1.3 billion) don't rely on Google services. Mostly Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo devices in China, but also in Russia, Indonesia, and Thailand. And all Huawei devices.
Sources: https://commandlinux.com/android/android-global-market-share..., https://support.google.com/android/thread/29434011/answering...
1. Retail presence
2. A large advertising budget
This is why it's so difficult to challenge the existing duopolies on desktop and mobile. If a consumer can't walk into a retail store, see a device on the showroom floor with the new OS installed by default, and buy a device with the new OS installed by default, then the new OS has zero chance of becoming mainstream.
Among other reasons, this is why Linux has failed to go mainstream. Linux has no retail presence, and it's not advertising to consumers.
Not sure what I'll do. Does Asus still make a phone?
Some more discussion in February
Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution
Google can do everything as they control the system - this gives full innovation capabilities. Then there are vendors which are restricted by Google via CDD (checked by CTS/VTS), they might add "privileged apps" but they can't touch what Google does on the system..
And only then there are regular developers/users, apps which they can install have very limited capabilities, they can't extend the system beyond a limited set of APIs that Google allows them to use.
This limits third party innovation already, but Google constantly makes it worse by restricting third party app capabilities even further under the guise of "security"..
I don't see them altering the permission model, you probably meant the possibility of modifying the system by tools such as Magisk, which indeed make it possible to install software much less restricted..
.. but you can do that on any device with an unlockable bootloader. Graphene/Lineage only remove some Google spyware.
Try to install a Lineage phone app on GrapheneOS to understand what I mean :)
I am not sure what you mean here. Any Android app should work on both Lineage and Graphene, it's the same base system. Graphene's debloating also goes far beyond removing some Google spyware. By default, there are no Google libraries, Play Store and Google apps.
- the package name is already taken and to replace app with the same name the package needs to be signed with the same key which you don't have
- even if you modify package name, it's a system privileged app, privileged apps may only be installed by Google/vendors (unless you're recompiling the OS [64GiB RAM needed])
- if you strip all the privileges, functions like call recording won't work.
Same for contacts and so on..