Seems that google’s announced plans to restrict sideloading on Android are now in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s order to open the Play Store to alternative app stores and reduce its control over app distribution.
How will this play out in the end… 🤔
Google’s announced plans aren’t actually about restricting “sideloading” (aka installing). They’re about restricting actually running the code, and developing/distributing the code.
Content distributed through these “other app stores” and elsewhere will remain installable, but your phone will refuse to run the software if that content isn’t signed with the special Google’s Favorite Boy token that the developer got by providing personally identifiable information to Google. Get that “certification”? Your app can be run on Android no matter how you distribute it, including “side loading” (download APK file, install app).
Don’t have the
Official Nintendo Seal of QualityVerified Developer token to sign your app with? The only way a user can run your code is by connecting to a PC and installing your app with adb (a development tool).Not at all, they can still require apps to be signed, so long as you’re free to allow app installations. They’ll weasel out by saying the signing is for safety/security reasons, to avoid malware and shit.
Right and then they might well lose the next antitrust suit for weaseling around. Judges know what this kind of behavior means, though who can say how they’ll react.
The timing is too perfect, the effects are too apparent.
So this means they’ll take responsibility for malware and offer support, right? Right?
Of course they will! /cough
Does this undermine Googles plans to block side loading?
Well, if i can download a F-droid app via Playstore… then i’m basically not “sideloading” anything. This could be interesting!
But the whole (paid) ‘verification’ thing still is troubling tho. And we know Google; they are good at breaking things one way or another.
My thoughts exactly. That could be very comfy for us users, but many devs will be (and justifiably so) wary of verifying themselves.
If I understand well, even if you were able to install F-droid through the store (which you can’t because Google doesn’t like it), you won’t be able to install apps with F-droid anyway if they implement this.
A lot of apk devs of nice little unique and often free apks are made by people who aren’t going to want to hand over there identification and private info to Google in order to be verified.
I mean, they can still send the code to F-Droid and F-Droid can sign it under their banner. F-Droid doesn’t have to do ID verification.
Google warns of security risks
lol. if they actually kept all the bad shit out of the play store, they might have a valid argument.
They are the security risks
To be fair, more stuff gets through the apple app store.
This said, fuck Google.
The Apple App Store is a cesspool. Has been for years. It’s just pushing short-term games with gobs of micro transactions by the hundreds. That’s almost all you see. Tons and tons of it.
Fuck Google. It is turning Android into dumb platform, which is tightly controlled by them piece by piece. From restricting different APIs (accessibility for example) to Play Integrity checks and recently developer identification even for stupid APKs. Fuck Google, I hope they keep being put in place.
I hope an alternative open platform emerges and google android goes poof. It would serve as a warning to others.
deleted by creator
my guess it’s hardware support; drivers and firmware for existing hardware and smartphone components for linux are probably close to nonexistent. The apk support is the smallest issue.
deleted by creator
It’s also the old hardware where no open source drivers exist. To clarify: open source drivers and firmware for phone modules are about as common as unicorns.
the main hurdles from my understanding are processor/chip specs. They are generally super locked down in terms of who they run with/allow usage. From what I understand the liberux project ran into that issue because their goal was a fully open sourced Linux phone, and they had to make compromises and are still fighting issues.
With PC people can get pick up whatever cpu, gpu, motherboard, and ram they want and put together a machine. But, phones are so much more reliant on prebuilts with little to no options when it comes to making your own phone hardware, so that is likely the largest barrier to becoming as open and flexible as PCs.
