I did my part!
What has happened with mobile platforms has proven that the fact that we ended up with PC platforms that allow us the freedom to largely do whatever we want with them was more an outlier than the norm.
Apple and Google have gone out of their way at every step with their new platforms over the last 20 years to make sure that process does not repeat itself. Even the stuff that seems more open like Android technically supporting arbitrary app installs from anywhere and the Linux container in ChromeOS still allows the platform holder to step in and stop you from doing something with those tools should they desire using mechanisms that the OS depends on to be useful.
Some poignant questions for these new platform requirements:
- How do you anticipate this being used against journalists and advocacy groups?
- What research and statistical quantification will be done to evaluate the amount of harm these restrictions can inflict?
- What precautions or safeguards will users have against malicious state actors or capitulating corporations?
- How can developers protect themselves from liable damages due to service interruptions caused by third party verification?
- Do you foresee legal restrictions in rollout due to national security concerns from differing nation states?
You will own nothing, and be angry. But you can’t do diddly squat about it. Now open wide and BOHICA.
What a disappointing week. I was looking to replace my five year old iPhone with an android phone and now I’m just stumped. Pixel 10 looked pretty good but then this sudden verification requirement news hit. Both platform are now equally crap. The hell with both of these shitty companies. Maybe I’ll go full retro and get a dumb phone instead.
Get a pixel secondhand and put an android fork on it. Its what I will likely do because I am sick of Google in my life and dont want to pay through the nose for a glossy shit that doesnt even have a file manager from apple.
iOS/iPad OS has had a file manager for years? It’s not great, and heavily restricted, but it for sure exists.
It’s not great, and heavily restricted, but it for sure exists
That’s kind of the point though. Apple’s file manager portrays a “flat” filesystem, where all of your data is laid out neatly on the table - so to speak - and the actual locations of those directories within the system are buried inside vague and protected locations “for security”. Android file managers embrace a more traditional Unix-like filesystem hierarchy.
Just today apple showed how stupid is this policy as they revoked the publisher certificate for a torrent app, proving that the end goal is not locking malware but stuff that they don’t like
This is just a way to capture negative feedback in a way that leaves you feeling like you did something while impacting none of their business. Make noise on social media, not feedback forms. Make them hurt.
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.
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?
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.
Apple requires some developer credentials and notarization for sideloading apps, to prevent known malware. What is the problem with this?
“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.
Another honest question:
Why wouldn’t the EU force Android to allow sideloading apps just as they’ve done with apple?
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
to prevent known malware
Nope
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?
People use Android to note 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.
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.
Like I said in another comment, unless they get tens of millions of actual unique-not-spam responses they will not even consider reconsidering. People aren’t going to de-google in any great numbers from this, because most of the people this will affect are already de-googled.
Rather than degoogling telling them you will go to Apple and opt for apple services is likely the more powerful response, since that is what the regular person is more likely to do. If degoogled is used they’ll likely dismiss it assuming it is just one of those niche nerds. But an exodus to Apple is a threat that is more realistic.
But that makes no sense - they’ll go to someone who is even more restrictive in side loading?
Google won’t reverse this because there’s no alternative for the relatively few people this will affect. They already don’t use Google things, and Apple don’t accomodate them. They’ve got them by the balls and they know it, which is why it’s all just empty threats even from people in here.
The ones that don’t sideload obviously won’t care. But the ones that do are going to have little incentive to stick around if that was the main selling point for them, and the devs for non Google play apps leave because they don’t want to hand over info to Google.
At that point why not go to Apple if Android no longer delivers the type of sideloading experience they desire? Apple is more polished, has longer support, battery life, and better peripherals.
And those types likely will push family to move to Apple too if they are jumping ship, since they might be the ones overseeing tech support for the family anyways.
You do it for posterity reasons
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.
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.
