Straight into the garbage.
I couldn’t tell from the article, but does this impact ALL apps that do NOT go through the Google Play Store?
What about 3rd party App Stores? Amazon has one, there is also the FOSS app stores like F-Droid. Are those in or out?
as long as your phone have GMS preinstalled and listed under Google certification. this will affect you. So, Chinese phone without GMS is fine.
F-Droid would likely be out because they rebuild many apps from source.
I have a feeling that this is a retaliation for those as Epic is leading a charge against Google Play, and rightly so, not that they are an ally. I just like watching pigs fight.
https://techbriefly.com/2025/08/01/epic-games-store-coming-to-google-play-after-court-win/
Come on, they don’t care. I will use a custom mod for as long as possible and when this stops working I will switch to two phones setup: de-googled daily driver and second phone for work/car apps. And if I will have to choose between stock Android and iPhone for the second phone I will go with an iPhone.
if this policy is implemented. the easiest thing for noobs will be get a Chinese phone without certification from Google https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices.html like huawei (you can get a GMS support with emulator like Gbox)
The problem I see is that the independent app market will not survive this if the audience of “normal” Android devices is gone. Most devs won’t bother developing apps that are not available on the play store, so alternative roms are not a solution in most markets.
They will for the Chinese market, whatever that’s worth.
I did it and I told them exactly why and what I use and why and hopefully they will take heed. It’s not even some freakishly avoid-y reason or anything. I’m not extremist because I know that if I’m going to use a lot of this stuff I have to make compromises because it’s not magically going to get better overnight, but also we have to stand up for user freedom so we have some degree of ability to actually use our devices as we wish and install software that we want on our own computer.
Were you able to sign up and give feedback without verifying your identity first?
This is silly. Google doesn’t give a single fuck. This decision will make money for key players and that’s the end of the conversation.
It’s very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.
No humans are involved in reviewing these. They go into the memory hole and that’s that.
Assigned to: Some Indiandude (xWF)
Their AI will be looking over all of the responses, not people. No important person at Google’s time will be wasted on this.
That’s why keywords are important. For instance I added the fact that if they continue in this course I will seek to de-Google my phones.
Doesnt matter.
Give feedback and pray it somehow does something!I dunno, I’m sure there’s a part of them that doesn’t want to scare off all the free labor they get from the community developers. They are probably legitimately trying to gauge how much of an impact on that this will have. That doesn’t mean they are going to stop or change anything, but they probably genuinely care enough to know.
I dunno, I’m sure there’s a part of them that doesn’t want to scare off all the free labor they get from the community developers.
Google’s thinking has gone short term “next quarter must go up.” They would absolutely trash their Android dev community for a quick buck, 100%.
This is the exact same argument the Hackintosh community had. “Apple will never put a stop to us, we’re the hardcore tinkerers who find bugs in their software before any normal user!”
Google doesn’t care. The hardcore users on the bleeding edge make up 0.001% of people with an Android phone. Pissing them off will not affect the shareholders.
You do it for posterity reasons
Closing the side loading option is a path to antitrust suits, a slap in the face to privacy, a kick in the teeth to independent devs and personal use.
There is zero reason for this other than wanting full control of how I use my own phone and how much money/data google can squeeze out of everyone.
I did not purchase a phone to have it later be functionally broken as features it had have been stripped in the name of ‘security’.
A warning message is all that is needed. The current toggle is enough.
We are not toddlers.
There are not possibly enough cases that it warrants such a restrictive policy aside from the stated reasons above.
Give me liberty or give me symbian.
How’s that?
Give me liberty or give me
symbianmaemoFTFY
Symbian had package signature fuckery :/
Public pushback on stuff like this does work on occasion. It even worked on Apple when they proposed upload filters for CSAM.
Google’s intent in the short term probably is just about malware, but in the long term it gives them, and governments which can pressure them the ability to ban any app from nearly all Android devices. Once deployed, there’s a near 100% chance of such a mechanism being used for evil.
Apple is a bit more receptive to bad PR, but Google has a history of kinda ignoring developer feedback, like with the JPEG XL thing as a narrow example.
This is an especially technical matter to; it’s no threat to them.
I don’t buy the malware arguement. Most major social apps function like malware (tracking location and anything they can). In the 90s, any app that did that (say to your laptop) would be treated as spyware.
Also the true malware is currently signed and it still reaches millions of people, most of the time downloaded straight from store.
It’s only spyware if Google can’t monetize it. Which is ironic if you think about it.
No doubt many “legitimate” apps, including some of Google’s own are spyware. This claims to be about the sort of malware that steals your bank account login.
I’d even speculate that most of the people involved are working in good faith; they think they’re the good guys and they can be trusted with that kind of power. Nobody should have that kind of power though because it always leads to corruption.
I would love to see an interview with the team. Because you’re probally right.
I would argue that was the definition even in the early 2000s. then it became a business model for famous companies.
True, even in the early 2000s, an application tracking your laptop locations would be treated as extremely dangerous spyware and the relevant could would be treated as a borderline criminal actor.
Google aren’t opposed to evil any more though, they removed their motto of “Don’t Be Evil”.
Alphabet Agency company was never opposed to evil. They’re like the "nice” drug dealer giving you what you like until you keep coming back. Or the guy in the van giving out free candy.
I thought their intent was to (attempt to) reduce piracy
Their intent is to reduce people running software they didn’t purchase through their commissioned store.
Is that an official Google form and/or who am I providing my (required) email address to?
Is there an official Google page that links to this? Sorry but anyone can share a Google form.
Yes, there is.
Here’s the official Android Developer page on the developer verification program. Bottom of the page, green square on the right labeled “Do you have any additional questions or feedback?”
Link is the same as in the post.
Very good. I’ve seen too many random Google Forms going around just harvesting emails / info to plug my details into any that I don’t click into from a legit/verified site. Not that I’m accusing OP of that, just that I don’t know where they got that form link.
Good point, I actually got it from another Lemmy user on the relevant thread from !android@lemdro.id.
Didn’t even think that there could be a potential risk with email harvesting.
You need to verify yourself before you submit. They testing.
Na. Used throwaway email tied to nothing. Selected the options that applied to me. Left them a cordial “fuck you and the horse you rode in on” feedback letter in the message box and submitted. No verification needed. The only chance for defense is giving them a number they can measure of people who will switch devices if they continue to pursue dev verification.
It doesn’t matter. I made up the Emil address and it went through
Here is the direct link to the form
Sounds like the thing that will finally get me onto another platform. Sideloading is the only way around most of these companys’ draconian restrictions.
What platform you going to go to? iPhones?
There aren’t really many choices when it comes to mobile OS.
Not a lot currently, but what’s needed is for the snowball to start rolling. This means the early adopters will have to make the more difficult decision of choosing “lesser” options wrt. comfort and convenience, compatibility, and bang for your buck. All decisions matter, and it will have long-term effects en masse.
If Windows phone didn’t take off, nothing will. It was so far ahead of its time, and a legit alternative, but developers didn’t want to support a new platform and neither did users.
The Windows phone entered the market while the market was stable, and users had little reason to move away from what they were used to and comfortable with. These days users are getting more uncomfortable, hence why Linux is on the rise. Same with the push for more liberal software (FOSS). I believe if a company can do it right, and offer a stable and comfortable alternative, they can manage to be much more successful than the Windows phone was 10 - 15 years ago.
Disclaimer: I haven’t checked the statistics, but I remain optimistic, and continue making choices that align with my principles.
At this point I’m ready to be an early adopter. I’m so tired that Im willing to do that.
Back to a Java flip phone then. Or just off portable radio based computing as a whole. We don’t need portable telephony, and we certainly don’t need to carry portable supercomputers.
True.
Linux on Mobile has a poor ecosystem and only works on older phones (older then most Android roms)Have you see FLX1 phone? Based on Debian.
Just looked it up, ane it seems to be $550 with worse specs than ny current phone I paid $130 for
No
I will transition off Android if this gets deployed, this is unacceptable.
What will you switch to?
Some android fork
To what exactly?
I am hoping PostmarketOS or perhaps SailfishOS get some much needed momentum both from Google’s actions and the fact that a lot of people (on a relative basis) are realising that many large American companies profoundly corrupt and cannot be trusted.
Its our chance to over turn this.
Let’s hope this won’t happen.Apple requires some developer credentials and notarization for sideloading apps, to prevent known malware. What is the problem with this?
Edit: everyone this is an honest question.
“North Korea does [X], what’s the problem with [USA/UK/EU] doing [X]?”
Apple method is terrible too and had to be forced by the EU to allow sideloading so tried to make it as restrictive as possible within the rules. And don’t think they bothered to support it outside the EU. So Apple is not the one to use as a defense of restrictions to installation of software om Android.
And I fear malware more from Google Play than F-droid with how they just allow anything and millions of installs give people a false sense of security until it’s later revealed it was a malware app. So no I don’t buy this security bullshit.
It’s about control and data harvesting.
People use Android to not have such restrictions.
Something like F-Droid (which published its own builds from source) would likely not be possible with such a model.
It’s certainly one of the main reasons I moved.
First, we don’t have this in Android and we’re better off.
It’s another flavour of gatekeeping.
Second, why do we want to copy apple?
to prevent known malware
Nope
Do you think Google won’t revoke the signature for apps like revanced or newpipe or send a c&d to the now doxxed devs?
Main reason apple did that is to limit piracy, nsfw apps and track how many installs so they can still bill the developer for that
It’s so lovely and cute to think that feedback will result in something, it definitely does, just look around us nowadays and we can see the brave Unicode characters hanging around as things have been improving on a daily basis! 🥰
Surely all feedback will be read by lovely humans, not by their clanker, because we all know how we always talk with flesh-and-bone humans, not clankers, whenever we reach some kind of “Help center” or “Contact us”.
With enough Unicode characters, the increasingly-dystopian tech world will definitely stop being dystopian! Onward, QWERTY keyboards!
/s
If they get one angry message they’ll ignore it. If they get 10,000 angry messages they might start worrying about what the people who haven’t sent messages will do if they proceed.
Public outcry doesn’t always work, but it has worked enough times to try again. It takes minimal effort for a significant potential gain.
It’s Google and Android, the biggest OS on the planet - they would need tens of millions of unique people with actual well written concerns before they even considered reconsidering.
Clanker: “Sentiment Analysis Complete: they don’t like it. They think it’s a scheme to consolidate power and market control. Beep boop.”
It really short circuits the power of mass feedback when it gets summarized by a bot. No nuance, no ingenious argumentation, nothing. None of that gets in front of the eyes of those managing the feedback.
And that’s because it’s inefficient to read everything.
Yeah, exactly!
Also, it’s highly dependent on the “prompt”, similarly to how HR companies are filtering resumes through prompts specifically written to ignore “undesirable resumes”. People who believe any sort of feedback will “let (name of a corporation) know what you think about (some enshittification event/feature)” aren’t just naive, but blatantly unaware of how enshittification got “meta” (pun intended) as in “enshittify all means of reversing any enshittification”, and this includes “user feedback”.
People try to argue how some past collective user feedback “did take effect”, pointing to things such as Apple’s real-time scanning of messages. They think Apple gave up of that, and they think this was due to strongly-worded collective feedback, as if corporations ever bothered themselves to carefully consider every user feedback and serve the wishes of their users, not their shareholders. I find this wishful thinking very cute and naive. In reality, corporations don’t give a nought about user feedback because they know people will be compelled to use their products.
For example: need banking to pay rent and groceries? Soon you’ll need their apps which will only work in Android or iOS, as offline banking and offline methods of payments is increasingly scarcer due to global digitalization of financial systems. As a Brazilian, I’ve been watching as Brazil already got “Pix” (a digital instant payment system) everywhere and fiat currency is increasingly difficult to withdraw from ATMs as more and more physical banks close their doors, other countries already have their own Pix-like systems of digital payment, and it’s just a matter of time before EU, USA, Australia and other “first-world countries” got (and enforce) their own as well.
tl;dr: The enshittification is broader than we think, and strongly-worded Unicode texts won’t change the course of global technofeudalism.
