Recently Google decided that in the future for an app to be installable on an Android device, the developer of this app needs to be ID’d and registered at Google. They claim this is in order to “to better protect users”. However, I think, this is a move to get more control over the Android ecosystem, and the data they can collect with it. If anyone who wants to develop an app for Android devices has to be registered with Google, this puts all the power of who to allow distributing an app to Google.
Furthermore F-Droid shows, that safe app stores can exist without registration, neither of users nor of developers. There is zero malware or spyware on the F-Droid store. What there is on F-Droid is thousands of beautiful, useful and, most importantly, safe apps. And this entire ecosystem is at risk, because Google wants to gain more control over its users and over the Android operating system.
Jesus that post is bleak. It’s basically “Please write your political representative to do something or we’re forced to close up shop”. Since all our political representatives are walking around with massive hard-ons at the idea of surveilling us, it’s basically a poorly veiled good bye note.
Honest question: what else can they do anyway? They cannot fight this war alone.
They really can’t, I’m not blaming them. Maybe they could pivot ressources to contribute to sailfish or postmarket in some form. Android is pretty much dead for people who want to own their devices at this point.
What I don’t understand yet: custom ROMs don’t need that dev verification. Everybody cries now, that F-Droid can close shop, if Google comes through. But why? F-Droid would still be the #1 distribution platform for de-googled ROMs. So why this “that would kill F-Droid” sentiment?
I mean, yep: it is a shitty move by Google, but who expects non-shitty moves from Google these days? Of course they will punish and oppress their customers. That is what Big Tech is here for. If anything we ought to help those users.
But Google also stopped publishing device trees for their devices. And they are withholding the Android source code until release. Android is being developed in secrecy behind closed doors now. Public access to security patches is delayed by four months.
Google is increasing their chokehold on the platform. Development and maintenance of custom ROMs is getting more and more difficult. More and more vendors such as Samsung and Xiaomi are removing the possibility to unlock the bootloader. Installing a custom ROM was never a mainstream thing, and it is increasingly becoming impossible for most people.
Yep. As I wrote: Google does shitty things. It’s time to try to establish an alternative OS for mobile.
Majority of users don’t use custom ROMs.Who wants to develop an app with no audience? Who wants to develop open source software on a platform that is more and more behind closed doors. I see why developer don’t agree with their terms. We need the right to use the software we want on our devices.
Phone hardware is getting locked down too, making it much harder to install custom ROMs. This is a full court press on our rights to use our devices as we want. They’ll close most of the loopholes.
To what others say (not many people use custom ROMs) I’ll add that using f-droid on a Googled ROM is often the first foot into the ecosystem, that might confort people into commiting to a custom ROM.
im gonna lose it if i cant use seal and fossify man ;-;
What does seal do?
its a video downloader for all kind of websites including Youtube
Huh neat! Thank you.
I think that they will leave the possibility to install apps from ADB
you can install apps like that if they’ve been signed with a developer key. or im guessing if you’ve compiled them yourself, and signed them with your developer key.
f-droid could still work, but it would need to be signed with a developer key, and any apps on there would need to be signed with developer keys
There is zero malware or spyware on the F-Droid store
That is a bold claim considering that :
- Proving that something does not exist is very hard
- F-droid allows you to rely on third party repositories (and makes it easy)
Although Google have to be mad lads if they actually think people are not responsible of what they install after having to enable developer options, accepting 2 popups and eventually adding a custom repository to F-droid.
I’m not really an expert on Android but isn’t it available in open source?
I’m curious why we don’t see more open source phone hardware and a fork of Android that doesn’t have egregious centralization. FOSS ideology has solved this in many areas.
Is the core issue that banking apps won’t run without signing or in a “secure environment”? And Google’s apps won’t run without play / Google services?
That is one issue. The next is that software support on phones is generally poor because there’s lots of proprietary drivers and they don’t have a common base system like computers do (bios). So building custom roms is difficult, doesn’t scale well over the number of different devices and they often don’t work great in the areas of camera, accelerated graphics and wireless networking. Also installing custom roms is also too difficult for the majority of people, and requires bootloader unlock which is either not possible at all or at a minimum cancels the warranty.
I believe Google is doing this to comply with the Cyber Resilience Act; no chance that this requirement is going away in the EU.
Makes me WannaCry ☹️
Bad ransomware jokes aside, it actually really does…
Please explain how this is even related to that
Of course, the DSA already requires app stores to collect copies of identity papers, but it excluded small enterprises. I guess that’s why F-Droid didn’t have to do that, so far.
The CRA takes effect in 2027. Maybe you could come up with some argument for how Google could do this differently. But why should they bother to lawyer this? It’s not their problem, and they’d only be damned for pushing back.
Article 23
Identification of economic operators
- Economic operators shall, on request, provide the market surveillance authorities with the following information:
(a) the name and address of any economic operator who has supplied them with a product with digital elements;
(b) where available, the name and address of any economic operator to whom they have supplied a product with digital elements.
- Economic operators shall be able to present the information referred to in paragraph 1 for 10 years after they have been supplied with the product with digital elements and for 10 years after they have supplied the product with digital elements.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A02024R2847-20241120
Does fdroid and free foss count as “economic”?
Google is collecting those names. They certainly have to comply. They are responsible for FOSS on their products. Wouldn’t want Google to get out of regulations by going open source…
The OSS community extensively lobbied for exceptions. You can click the link and see for yourself how much open source gets mentioned. The more professional foundations like Mozilla should be safe, as well as individual contributors. I’m not so sure about the in-between; individuals with FOSS repositories who collect donations.
Will you be able to install the fdroid store with ads?
