Exactly. The fact that we've all internalized "store" as the default distribution model is itself a win for the platform gatekeepers. On desktop, nobody calls a .deb repo or a download link a "store" — it's just software distribution. Android sideloading should be the same: download an APK, verify the signature, install. The entire debate around "alternative stores" already concedes that distribution requires someone's permission.
Hrun0•about 3 hours ago
I have literally never thought about it like this, but I think you are right. In my mind mobile phones were always separate from other devices, kinda like consoles.
trekz•about 3 hours ago
Right. Consoles shouldn't be doing it either, but here we are...
Just to put out what Google actually said in their blog post [0]:
> We appreciate the community's engagement and have heard the early feedback – specifically from students and hobbyists who need an accessible path to learn, and from power users who are more comfortable with security risks. We are making changes to address the needs of both groups.
> We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.
> Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months.
It is also true that they have not updated their developer documentation site and still assert that developer verification will be "required" in September 2026 [1]. Which might be true by some nonsensical definition of "required" if installing unverified apps requires an "advanced flow", but let's not give too much benefit of the doubt here.
> We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.
In classic Google fashion, they hear the complaint, pretend that it's about something else, and give a half baked solution to that different problem that was not the actual issue. Any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.
greatgib•about 24 hours ago
Even restricting the mitigation to "students and hobbyists" is bad.
I should have the right to have parents, friends or anyone use a "free" store that is not under control of Google if the user and app developer wish so. But also, somehow there should be something done to avoid the monopoly forcing to use the Google services. Like major institutions like bank, gov and co being forced to provide alternatives like a webapp when they provide app tied to the Google play store.
klabb3•about 6 hours ago
> I should have the right to […] use a "free" store that is not under control of Google
Yes, but we also need to stop thinking like we’re trying to please the ghost of Steve Jobs. There is no ”store”. There are installers. You distribute them how you see fit, probably through the web.
These ”alternative stores” angle is a controlled dissent corporate plan B, much like how recycling was propped up by the fossil fuel industry.
echelon•about 15 hours ago
We deserve web installs without deep settings menu configurations, scare walls, or onerous processes.
The EU and every other nation with digital sovereignty concerns need to make this happen to both Apple and Google.
These are our devices. The giants are camping.
fragmede•about 15 hours ago
But unfortunately, it turns out that some people you interact with aren't actually your friend. That guy that seems totally legit and just wants your sister to install his fun little game/app that he wrote is actually trying to get her to install an app that's going to track your location and read all your messages and copy all your photos. To keep her safe from the "actually" bad people, of course.
sulam•about 14 hours ago
I'm far from a Google apologist, but at the end of the day don't they have the right to write software however they want it? You have the right to build things the way you want to, fork Android, etc etc. If you're trying to say you have the right to tell Google what the code their employees write can do, well, I don't really agree with that. Sounds coercive, honestly. I wouldn't want them to do that to you and I don't want you to do that to them.
idiotsecant•1 day ago
I think you've omitted the next section, which seems more relevant. It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text. Seems reasonable?
joecool1029•1 day ago
> It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text.
This was already the case for enabling sideloading at system level: it warned you. Nobody really says having this toggle is a bad thing, basically the user shouldn't get an ad network installing apk's just browsing around the web without their informed consent (and android has been found to be vulnerable to popunder style confirmations in the past).
They also already had the PlayProtect scanning thing that scans sideloaded APK's for known malware and removes it. People already found this problematic since what's to stop them pulling off apps they just don't like, and no idea what if any telemetry it sends back about what you have installed. There have been a handful of cases where it proved beneficial pulling off botnet stuff.
Finally, they also have an additional permission per-application that needs to be enabled to install APK's. This stops a sketchy app from installing an APK again without user consent to install APK's.
The question is: How many other hurdles are going to be put in place? Are you going to have to do a KYC with Google and ping them for every single thing you want to install? Do you see how this gets to be a problem?
bityard•1 day ago
The whole point of TFA, if you read it, is that they SAID they would do that, but there has since been ZERO evidence that they actually will. This feature is not present in anything they have released since that statement.
Xelbair•1 day ago
No, because it isn't something that should be up to google's control.
yjftsjthsd-h•1 day ago
> We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands.
I've lived through them locking down a11y settings "to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer", and it's a nightmare. It's not just some scare text, it's a convoluted process that explicitly prevents you from just opening the settings and allowing access. I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt; after they actually show what their supposed solution is we can discuss it, but precedent is against them.
> Seems reasonable?
No. As I said before, any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.
Zak•1 day ago
> It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text.
That describes the current (and long-established) behavior. App installation is only from Google's store by default and the user has to manually enable each additional source on a screen with scare text.
BadBadJellyBean•about 24 hours ago
Why is it reasonable that installing software is behind an "advanced flow" what ever that means? I find it not very reasonable at all that the only way to install software on my phone is by jumping through hoops. I don't think it reasonable that the Play Store is the only portal. I don't even find it reasonable to call installing software "sideloading". Downloading and installing software from a vendor's page has been the norm for decades before smart phones came along but all of a sudden when it is on a small screen the user can not be trusted? That's ridiculous and not at all reasonable.
Macha•1 day ago
It's deliberately written to be vague and not say anything, and given the original intention, it's hard to believe that means it should be interpreted generously.
thewebguyd•1 day ago
> shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists.
Even that is a step too far in the wrong direction. Doesn't matter if it's free, or whatever, simply requiring an account at all to create and run software on your own device (or make it available to others) is wrong.
There exists no freedom when you are required to verify your identity, or even just provide any personal information whatsoever, to a company to run software on your device that you own.
surajrmal•about 4 hours ago
The problem with this mentality is that you're not proposing a solution that solves the problem Google and Apple are trying to solve (or are at least stating they are). Rather than just vent about ideals, showing up to the table and listening to the requirements of all stakeholders (even if they differ from yours) will lead to a more productive result. I would not listen to your concerns if you didn't listen to mine.
fdsjgfklsfd•about 3 hours ago
They aren't actually trying to solve any real problem.
> We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth, and having journalists just copy/paste Google posts serves no one.
> But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issue… As time marches on people were left with the impression that everything was done, fixed, Google “wasn’t evil” after all, this time, yay!
sneak•about 11 hours ago
> We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands.
Perhaps this, when shipped, will pave the way for sane regulation of Apple’s practices along these lines, too.
cmxch•1 day ago
So basically the Apple model but worse.
WarmWash•1 day ago
The judge told Google that Apple is not anti-competitive because Apple has no competitors on it's platform (this all stemming from the Epic lawsuits).
Google listened.
Blame the judge for one of the worst legal calls in recent history. Google is a monopoly and Apple is not. Simple fix for Google...
madeofpalk•about 12 hours ago
Google lost because they have all the emails colluding to prevent competition.
If Google had not done that, they wouldn't have lost.
hmry•about 9 hours ago
The lesson? Only discuss illegal activity in auto-delete Slack channels
antback•about 8 hours ago
Apple has not competitors and it is not a monopoly? This is exactly the definition of monopoly.
boberoni•1 day ago
The link is to the f-droid blog. The official "Keep Android Open" site is at https://keepandroidopen.org/, and contains good information on how you can contribute by contacting regulators.
I want Google as an app, not OS. Hear me out. Imagine an open device where you can run Google as just another sandboxed app. Inside, they can exert all the control they want. My bank and government can force me to use Google.
Then, at least I control my hardware and my OS.
It's just nasty to have your device and OS controlled by an antagonistic entity.
I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can't fight Google alone; it's pointless to resist.
intrasight•about 9 hours ago
You have that. Run Chrome browser on Linux. We should be thankful we have Linux.
allddd•about 9 hours ago
GrapheneOS is as close as you can get to something like this.
elAhmo•about 10 hours ago
But Google doesn't want you running their app and not their OS, this is the whole idea behind Android and their hardware in general :)
Synaesthesia•about 7 hours ago
Well yeah that's the problem. The Google monopoly. Google and Apple are the only one out there, in the West at least. It's a huge problem. We have given all the power to two giant corporations. Really the only institution which can compel a change is the state.
stavros•about 6 hours ago
Yeah but what you just said is "I don't want to run Android", which, sure, you can do.
We ("you") have no power to keep android open. Unfortunately it is in the hands of a company that is building it for profit, in a way or the other.
It's been our choice to drink this glass of wishful thinking while giving that company a solid dominant position in the market.
We ("you") can only make choices that will overturn that trend.
Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.
sigmoid10•1 day ago
It's also heavily influenced by businesses. Most employers will happily hand you an Apple or Android phone for work, but I don't think there is a single company out there that would dare to hand normal people an Ubuntu Touch based phone.
phoronixrly•1 day ago
We (people who live in a country/confederacy with working antitrust laws) have power to keep large companies from anticompetitive practices such as this one.
fsflover•about 11 hours ago
> Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.
My smartphone runs an FSF-endorsed OS, PureOS. This is reality. It's not open hardware, but it's a long way from Android in the right direction. You can also get a Precursor, which is open hardware.
direwolf20•about 10 hours ago
A Precursor costs about 1000$ and only does cryptography, not Flappy Bird. Most of these supposedly open alternatives make no economic sense.
notorandit•about 2 hours ago
It does instead, imho.
Commercial phone cost also includes the data value it steals continuously.
colordrops•1 day ago
If they close things up with no alternative, the free open source software will likely start to catch up. it will take a few years though. This could be a blessing in disguise.
RussianCow•1 day ago
There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company. And before you say something along the lines of, "But they don't need to compete, they just need to be good enough", that still requires business to put their apps on some open source app store and make them compatible with the open source OS, and there is close to zero incentive for them to do so.
It is a disgrace how Google has managed this situation.
To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an "advanced flow" for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe.
But this promised feature hasn't appeared in any Android 16 or 17 betas. Google is quietly proceeding with the original lockdown.
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
arcanemachiner•1 day ago
If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones, then this will end up being a good thing, and the greatest favor that Google could do for the open source community.
Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years.)
cwillu•about 22 hours ago
It won't though, because there's a ecosystem of banking/insurance/whatever apps that have bought into the android/iphone lockdown mindsete that people will simply be locked out of. Open alternatives can grow when there is a viable means of slow growth, and cutting off the oxygen to such things is the implicit intent.
ipdashc•about 22 hours ago
> banking/insurance/whatever apps
I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why. I use my bank's app maybe once or twice a year when I need to Zelle someone, which I only need to do when they don't have Venmo. (Unless we consider Venmo a banking app.)
I only have one bank's app installed, the rest of my banks I only interact with over their website, on desktop.
As for insurance, I've never had an insurance company's app installed.
Am I just an outlier here? Honestly, if I switched to a non standard OS, I'd be more annoyed about losing, say, Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, or various chat apps. Banking and insurance just don't come to mind at all as something I need my phone for.
Denatonium•about 22 hours ago
The best solution for this is to buy a $30 burner phone at Walmart and use it unactivated, tethered to your main de-Googled device. You can use the burner for only tasks requiring Play Integrity.
Make sure to leave one star reviews on all such apps that you run into.
crvdgc•about 13 hours ago
In theory, it's possible to have a third party (other than Google or Apple) to provide attestation on third party hardware.
You can have a separate core and kernel to run such code. They don't have to be powerful, but they'll need to be small enough to be verified by the said provider. For most of the code that doesn't need attestation, they can be executed on normal hardware.
The provider also has to convince the regulator or banks to trust them. However, if that's solved, the user should feel no difference between pure Android and alternative platform plus attestation.
danny_codes•about 19 hours ago
I’ve found the mobile websites for a lot of these cases to be fine. Not a great UX but not a blocker
econ•about 15 hours ago
The Wero payment system will cover the entire EU but apparently doesn't have a web portal the way ideal has.
Soon we Europians will only be able to pay using either an iphone or an Android device.
Hilarious
deejaaymac•about 16 hours ago
So what you're saying is we go after the banking system next.
Decentralized banking is the future!
INB4 someone mentions some edge case like 'grandma got scammed' or refunds.
mhitza•about 20 hours ago
In that case a two phone approach makes sense. I was willing to try that out, to give Ubuntu Touch a trial on my main phone. This might incentivise it even further for an off-ramp of the Google/Apple duopoly.
fny•about 18 hours ago
Don't banks/insurers/whatever have websites that are often mobile friendly?
aryonoco•about 19 hours ago
I’m old enough to remember the days that banking apps required Internet Explorer and didn’t work on Firefox. Eventually, they were dragged kicking and screaming to support all modern browsers.
godelski•about 19 hours ago
Microsoft's shit show seems to be pushing Linux adoption
mistercheph•about 20 hours ago
LMFAO what are you doing on your banking app all the time
matheusmoreira•about 18 hours ago
There's no point. Remote attestation means your device needs to be corporate owned to be trusted. Even if you had your own linux phone, it wouldn't be able to interface with institutions such as banks and governments. They trust Google's keys, not yours. This doesn't quite end free computing, it just kills it for normal people and ostracizes us hackers who insist on owning our systems.
Some banks have added their verified boot keys. I think it helps that GrapheneOS is well-known by now for great security practices (most likely more secure than all vendor phones out there).
jadbox•about 18 hours ago
Not sure what gov require, but most credit unions do not use such lockdowns
good8675309•about 24 hours ago
Until Android is crippled it will continue to take resources away from Linux Phone development and companies that will launch phones for it
andrewmcwatters•about 19 hours ago
I got downvoted heavily about a year ago saying we need to abandon Android and the industry needs to pivot back to just putting GNU/Linux on a phone already.
Of course, now Google is doing what Google was always going to do.
spacebuffer•1 day ago
For me as a desktop linux poweruser, I find this potential transition pretty intimidating, I've never flashed a phone with a custom rom let alone switch to a completely different OS, and I am not sure if the phone can even be reset to its original OS, if things go south.
fenykep•about 20 hours ago
/e/OS at least has a browser based installer[0] for quite some supported phones.
I definitely recommend trying it out, installing a custom os on my phone gave me the same feeling when I first ran debian on a laptop struggling under windows (even though the performance gains aren't that apparent in my opinion).
Expecting Google to give up control of one of the only alternative operating systems is right up there with believing in the tooth fairy.
What you're saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).
A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.
yason•about 22 hours ago
In general, governments seem to be much more invested in making it illegal to have anything that is too open and too free. Even EU is lusting for draconian control features like chat control where you don't own and operate the software you installed on your device even if, at the same timem, they're trying to gnaw on the influence of Big Tech.
riedel•about 16 hours ago
Adoption would mean that orgs like the European Payment Initiative behind Wero would adopt Linux phones even other AOSP ROMs. Not seeing that. Banks and streaming platforms that require DRM are keeping most (non-activist type) users locked in.
fwipsy•about 15 hours ago
It may push a minority of users who really care about open source to Linux phones. I expect the majority of users will grumble but cave and re-adopt mainstream Android or Apple.
kelvinjps10•about 18 hours ago
But there is a lot of resources put into the android ecosystem already. Even open source apps like anki, syncthing etc
beeflet•about 24 hours ago
The limitation of linux phones is hardware. I have been watching the progress of postmarketOS on the fairphone 4, and looks promising.
gf000•about 11 hours ago
No, gnu/Linux is nowhere near usable as a daily driver mobile device for 99% of the population.
Besides having terrible battery life and security, it's just a hobby thing. Android has had millions of dev hours poured into it to be what it is.
> If this finally pushes adoption of truly open Linux phones...
It won't.
observationist•about 23 hours ago
Even if you have linux, there are still third parties that have control over your hardware. Even if you're using graphenos, you can't block the sim or the cellular radio stack, and likely other modules on the SoC, from at-will access to every sensor on the device. You can at least protect your files, unless there's a mitm or other vector that graphenos can't cope with. And at worst, they can simply clone all your encrypted bits and wait on Moore's law or sufficient cubits to go back and crack the copy, on the off chance there's anything they want with your data in the first place.
What a lame and useless doomer POV. Do you refuse to go outside because a lightning strike could kill you at any instant? Why let things that aren't in your control (yet) stop you from taking control of the things you can now?
fsflover•about 22 hours ago
My phone has hardware kill switches for modem, WiFi/Bluetooth and mic/camera. All three together also kill all sensors.
spystath•about 21 hours ago
There is an implicit shame in disgrace but faceless entities have no shame. They'll just put out another press release written in corporate newspeak by an LLM and move on withe the plans anyway. This is standard Google behaviour. They do it with Chrome, they do it with Android, they'll keep doing it with all their captive markets. I fear that in practice even having an "advanced flow" will make little difference as some applications will refuse to work if you have it enabled anyway (in the same vein if debugging is enabled, for example).
Nothing about Android is open except the absolutely minimum amount of linux kernel that's required to boot the thing. Then it's blobs and restrictions all the way to the screen.
microtonal•1 day ago
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using).
I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:
The enforcement mechanism is in Google Play Services, not AOSP. To laypeople the difference doesn't matter but to folks looking for alternatives it does, so the discussion is often muddied and imprecise. This is like when YouTube removed public dislike counts and it turned into "they're removing the dislike button!"
akdev1l•1 day ago
You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policy
So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.
Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace
I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social
gizmo686•1 day ago
All distributions involve maintaining patch sets. The question is what the marginal burden of this particular patch is.
izacus•about 7 hours ago
But that just sounds the big community demanding this has to put together a proper KDE-like team to maintain Android in the way they want instead of waiting on Google's code?
rezonant•about 23 hours ago
Doesn't require me to sign in or create account...
buckle8017•1 day ago
The patch set for graphene is substantial, this is a relatively minor change.
retired•about 24 hours ago
Good thing restricting side-loading isn't legal in the European Union! Not a problem here. Apple had to enable side-loading on their EU-based phones and so will Google if they restrict it.
post-it•about 24 hours ago
Yes it is, and no they didn't. Apple has to allow (heavily restricted) alternative app stores, and I'm not clear on whether any actually exist right now.
yxhuvud•about 12 hours ago
What Apple restricts and is legal are not the same. Apple is doing malicious compliance and the legal system ain't buying it. But it takes some time and iterations to shake out.
My understanding is that how Apple is restricting the alternative app stores is also illegal in EU, so I don't thinkt this is the end of this story.
lern_too_spel•about 23 hours ago
The kind of "side-loading" of notarized apps outside the manufacturer's app store that Apple allows in the EU is exactly what Google proposed to do for all its Android builds. We don't want that.
sepositus•about 23 hours ago
How specific is the law? What if side loading requires a "trusted" signed certificate where trusted means from Google Play?
Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.
Pxtl•about 22 hours ago
If a lawsuit tackles this problem in the EU, will we finally also see somebody go after MS for their obnoxious code signing certificates?
While MS code signing certs are more circumventable for power-users than Android's new approved developer program, their pricing is far more prohibitive for independent OSS developers and hobbyists, costing hundreds of USD per year.
pino83•about 21 hours ago
Good news: You (as a community) can now finally wake up from your dreams and get some things right!
It's really a shame that you always wait until you really get forced. Particularly in situations when every individual's inability has consequences for the others as well. I really gave up all ideas of a better world. With this community, the best you can hope is that the decay will be slow.
So everyone who would describe himself/herself as a FOSS enthusiast, or at least a friend of a somewhat open system where the user has some actual rights beyond sole consumption, put some pressure towards having actually de-Googled systems. A system that mostly comes from Google, would not fit my definition of that term at all! Even if they removed some parts of it. It's an euphemism. And it's dangerous because you constantly get trapped by these euphemisms. Ever. Single. F'ing. Time.
earth2mars•about 22 hours ago
The only reason I was sticking to Android for years is this. And I think there is no moat for Android. I would rather switch to iOS if both platforms are same restrictive.
singpolyma3•about 19 hours ago
You'll miss having a keyboard that works
cromka•about 18 hours ago
It'll be sorted in about 9 days.
aryonoco•about 19 hours ago
I did this last year. Reluctantly. And using iOS still hurts. But it’s better than that Google crap.
I developed my own Android ROMs from 2009-2011, complete with my own tuned kernel. I ran the local Android developers MeetUp group and evangelised Android development. When Honeycomb launched I helped OEMs test their beta firmware. For free.
But as Google has become certified Evil, the direction of Android has been very clear. In practice I honestly can’t say it’s now any more open than iOS. Except it has a lot more avenues for Google to mine your data to sell ads. And the quality of third party apps on it is decidedly worse.
I thought long and hard about getting a Linux phone. But I need a good camera on my phone to take random snaps of kids/pets/etc. And the Linux phones just aren’t there.
I hate the shitty duopoly we have ended up with. But I now realise that the openness of x86 and pc as platform really was an accident of history.
freakynit•about 17 hours ago
Why does there seem to be a growing push to tie real-world identity to nearly everything we do online? The justification is almost always "safety". I know this trend has been developing for years, but over the past couple of years it feels like it's accelerated globally.
snerbles•about 17 hours ago
Online anonymity makes it harder for TPTB to punish dissidents.
raincole•about 16 hours ago
Before we had mainly one excuse: to protect the kids
Later we got a new one: to reveal Russian shills/propaganda bots
Now we also have: to filter out AI slop
Any problem the internet experiences will eventually become an excuse to eliminate online anonymity.
jacooper•about 17 hours ago
There's strong political backing for it now.
kace91•about 17 hours ago
I think people in power have realized the impact of misinformation campaigns. And to be fair, western countries have proved to have the resilience of a wet paper bag against foreign influence and private interests.
I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here. A move back to the early 2000s internet would be the ideal middle ground, which requires separating social stuff from informational stuff, and both from engagement algorithms. I have no idea how we’re supposed to put that genie back in the bottle.
And to be clear I’m not saying this as vouching for the current push, I hate it as well.
AngryData•about 15 hours ago
Yeah, propaganda works, and the US wants to stop foreign propaganda, but the problem is they still want to push their own brand of US biased propaganda so they can't put in any sort of useful journalistic standards requirements upon media conglomerates or it will tie their own efforts up in court and lawsuits.
NewJazz•about 15 hours ago
I think one major issue is the shortening of people's attention spans. People consume snippets of information that show a tiny fraction of the full story. They don't spend 10 minutes reading an article or watching a video, with a few exceptions. More people probably watch clips of Jon Stewart than actually watch his show. I think we ought to start addressing that issue, and see how it affects the efficacy of misinformation campaigns.
Yes, misinformation is a problem. Deanonymization is a bigger problem. If you can't say anything anonymously, it becomes much more difficult to fight entities bigger and more powerful than you.
sfjailbird•about 15 hours ago
"Misinformation" usually meaning information the people in power would rather you don't get to see and make up your own mind about.
good8675309•1 day ago
Personally I'm excited about the death of Android, now resources can be put toward mainstreaming and maturing the Linux Phone ecosystem
Hopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone
codethief•about 24 hours ago
Strong disagree. Linux, its permission system and its (barely existent) application isolation are lightyears away from the security guarantees that Android brings.
cosmic_cheese•about 24 hours ago
Desktop OSes and their derivatives are woefully behind in this regard, and unfortunately the will to bring them up to par is incredibly weak. Of those in mass use (Qubes OS is neat but its user base isn’t even a rounding error), macOS probably does the most, but it’s still lagging behind iOS and what’s been implemented has come with much consternation from the technically inclined peanut gallery.
I understand some amount of reticence with commercial OSes, but there’s no justification for being against it on open Linux based desktops and mobile OSes. We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time with the only (scantly) meaningful safeguards coming in the form of *nix user permissions.
idle_zealot•about 22 hours ago
This might be a strange take in these times, but I feel like the browser largely solved the "I need to run potentially adversarial application code in a sandbox". For native applications, stick to stuff that's vetted and in well-maintained repositories, or well-known open source projects that you trust. All of this technical work just to be able to run hostile native code ignores that you don't have to, and probably shouldn't want to, run sketchy code on your device. Installing random untrusted software is bad, even with the most advanced security model in the world. At the very least it will probably abuse whatever permissions it has to spy on you to any degree it can (which is a lot, even for web pages) and to send you advertising notifications.
shevy-java•about 24 hours ago
This assumes that the mentioned systems are the only security considerations on a Linux system. Clearly this is not the case so I am unsure why you omit other security-related aspects of Linux here.
rudhdb773b•about 15 hours ago
The security of Android doesn't mean much to me as long as the front door is left open by design for Google, and therefore the government, to directly spy on you.
array_key_first•about 22 hours ago
You can build those things on top of Linux, like Android did. Linux has containerization and all.
LtWorf•about 19 hours ago
Android brings malware apps and security fixes that come after months rather than next day compared to GNU/Linux.
The isolation is nice but not so important once you stop running malware constantly.
apitman•about 23 hours ago
Not lightyears. About 20 years, which is how long it took Google to pile on the mountain of complexity and inefficiency to accomplish this.
iugtmkbdfil834•about 24 hours ago
I.. don't think it will happen. For several reasons too. It is not that I don't think Android will change substantially, but the following constraints suggest a different trajectory:
- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability
- there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace )
- small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks
- anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
Joe_Cool•about 24 hours ago
I think adoption will hinge on whether existing Android apps will just run on it with something like waydroid/anbox or not.
Gaming on Linux took off with Proton. Linux on phones might go the same path.
anonzzzies•about 24 hours ago
I understand why mobile/tablet OSs are so crappy compared to desktop; in the past these devices had no resources cpu and ram wise and had to heavily watch battery consumption (the latter is still true mostly, but that should be up to the user), but my phone is more powerful than my laptop and yet runs crap with no real usable filesystem and all kinds of other weirdness that's no longer needed.
However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.
I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
necovek•about 22 hours ago
FWIW, Nokia did develop a pretty good Linux phone back in the day (Maemo/Meego) with Nokia N9 (it even received rave reviews from consumer tech sites like engadget), but it did get killed off as they got absorbed into Microsoft (we all know that didn't age well).
Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.
Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.
The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.
hombre_fatal•about 22 hours ago
This is one of the most naive things I see people repeat.
The reality is that we're lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.
Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.
Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that's mostly-good, they'll finally get something that's even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else's).
In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.
Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html/css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.
If only there weren't Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else's.
tadfisher•about 22 hours ago
Agreed that there is a ton of baby in this bathwater.
Also, the open nature of AOSP gave Google its advantage during the early days. Since then, Google has morphed into a company that would likely not make the same decision to create an open-source OS free for others to use and contribute to.
So in the end, what we as consumers actually get, in 2026:
- Google encourages application developers to use hardware attestation to prevent themselves from running on non-blessed, third-party AOSP distributions.
- Google builds basic functionality people care about (including passkeys!) into Play Services, a closed mega-application that happens to require a Google account for most features, and is a moving target for open distributions to mimic.
- Google has closed AOSP contributions to themselves and OEM partners only. AOSP releases are now quarterly source dumps.
- OEMs which traditionally allowed bootloader unlocking (and thus actual ownership of the hardware) have removed it as a matter of policy.
So what exactly is open about Android anymore? Does "source-available OS you can see and not touch" align with your interests? Because it's increasingly not aligned with mine.
echelon•about 24 hours ago
> death of Android
death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?
A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
acheron•about 22 hours ago
> A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
I mean, breaking news from 2010, but of course never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
shevy-java•about 24 hours ago
I like it, because more and more people see Google as what it is: a ruthless, selfish and extremely greedy mega-mega-corporation. The less we depend on it the better.
flaburgan•about 22 hours ago
>The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don't see why they would not remove the verification and that's an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.
hbn•1 day ago
Who could Android be possibly recommended to at this point?
I know iPhones aren't affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the "customization" things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don't care about.
I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow/habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I've seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development/distribution environment is gone, etc.
If people can't even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they're really just a shitty iOS knockoff.
pfix•1 day ago
But this thread is about the option to install apps on your device regardless of OS vendor approval, and that's not possible either with iOS nor is iOS open source. And that's what this is all about. If you don't care about open-source and user freedom, then this change wouldn't matter to you anyway.
bpye•1 day ago
I switched back to Android in large part for KDE Connect. You can get continuity esque features that work with any desktop operating system. I also get to use real Firefox instead of a Safari wrapper. I still use as few Google services as possible, pretty much just Maps.
_factor•about 24 hours ago
KDE Connect works just fine on iOS.
singpolyma3•about 19 hours ago
As someone who hates both android and iOS but currently has to use iOS, I definitely hate it more. It lacks so many things one can take for granted on android. Even a usable keyboard is missing from iOS.
pjmlp•about 24 hours ago
I love the Java/Kotlin userspace, even if it is Android Java flavour, and the our way or the highway attitude to C and C++ code, instead of yet another UNIX clone with some kind of X Windows into the phone.
In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.
I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.
However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.
If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.
cyberax•1 day ago
> But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android?
How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.
Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.
I'm not even talking about its "walled concentration camp" app model.
iririririr•about 24 hours ago
you're a really vanilla user then.
wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.
ClikeX•about 24 hours ago
There are several that plug into Safari, and Pihole just works. Does Android have ad blockers that do more? It's been a few years since I switched.
zie•about 24 hours ago
Thankfully you don't really need an adblocker for apps on an iPhone. Your browser could use one, but thankfully those do exist :)
That said, I want off the iOS ecosystem, but Google has basically said guess what? We are going the way of Apple, so we don't care about you either.
So right now there isn't really anywhere else to go. I'm going to keep trucking in iOS for now, but I hope I find something better soon.
wolpoli•1 day ago
At this point, I wouldn't recommend Android other than enjoying the much steeper discount with the headset. For me, the only thing that is keeping me on Android is easier access to commas on the keyboard.
ruuda•1 day ago
I contacted the EU DMA team about my concerns and got a real reply within 24 hours. Not just an automated message, it looked like a real human read my message and wrote a reply. I'd urge other EU citizens to do the same.
microtonal•1 day ago
Great idea, I just did the same. I encourage other EU citizens to do the same. Keeping at least one of the two major mobile ecosystems open is important.
(And install GrapheneOS, the more successful open Android becomes, the better.)
stratom•1 day ago
GrapheneOS is great. But that currently means you have to buy a phone from Google to work around Google looking down Android.
microtonal•about 24 hours ago
True. I'm really happy that they are working with an OEM to bring an alternative in 2027. Until then:
- A refurbished Pixel works (except some weird Verizon locking that I heard about the other day).
- Pixels get really heavily discounted near the end of the cycle (e.g. 9a currently). Google probably doesn't make much on it if you are opting out of your ecosystem.
troyvit•about 22 hours ago
When I do this for family I buy a used pixel. Then no dollar goes directly back to Google.
palata•about 23 hours ago
They say they will announce a partnership with a major OEM manufacturer in March 2026!
pimterry•about 9 hours ago
Done! I wrote up both my concerns about this and how it affects app/app-store market competition, and how limitations like Play Integrity encourage apps to block usage on non-Google approved devices as well, since that's anti-competitive within the mobile device & OS market (blocking GrapheneOS, Waydroid, etc).
Supporting free competition with and within the Android market is in theory what these teams are all about so hopefully with enough voices they'll push harder on it. I'd love to see a shift here that makes non-Google/Apple-controlled mobile a possible option (even if it's a Linux-on-desktop-style niche for the foreseeable future)
mzajc•1 day ago
For posterity, what was their sentiment?
flaburgan•about 22 hours ago
Could anyone provide me some clarifications?
If I understood correctly, to "protect" users, Google wants to control what is installed on Android phones. I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app, which in turn means:
- That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps
- That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.
Obviously this is awful and would mean the end of F-droid and Aurora store etc.
However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something? Why do people link this app verification thing with a possible closing of AOSP?
Also, Mozilla was already saying it 10years ago with Firefox OS but... The web is the platform. 90% of the apps out there could be websites. We have all technologies needed for this including offline with service workers. And it works on every damn platform, even the most obscure OS has a web browser. Don't want to be locked to an ecosystem? Just target the web!
slumberlust•about 21 hours ago
90% of apps are just websites with a wrapper UI.
blueg3•about 21 hours ago
There's a lot of misinformation here.
> I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app
No, non-Play stores will still work, but developers will need to register a developer account with Google that is tied to some real identity. They already need to do this to distribute through the Play store, but now it'll apply regardless.
This is to make it harder for scam apps to churn app signatures. Kind of like requiring code-signing, but with only one CA.
> That users won't be able to install what they want
No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.
> and that they would need a google account to install apps
Nope.
> That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.
They don't need to distribute through Google, but they will need to be involved with Google and do identity verification.
> However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something?
You're being misinformed. They won't even need to strip the verification. The verification is only for certified Android -- OEMs that partner with Google. Custom ROMs and the OEMs that aren't certified (Amazon, some Chinese manufacturers) won't have verification.
The target audience for verification and who would ever use a custom ROM has basically zero overlap.
kevincox•about 19 hours ago
I mostly agree with your points.
> > That users won't be able to install what they want
> No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.
So the user can't install what they want. They can only install stuff signed by developers Google has "approved".
Yes, in the happy situation this is everything except for developers that Google has revoked. But technically it is only approved developers.
blueg3•about 19 hours ago
That's pedantically fair. I broke up a longer statement:
> That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps
It was split up because "need a Google account to install apps" is strictly untrue, but "won't be able to install what they want" is more nuanced.
I did clearly say, "it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry".
So, it depends on what the user wants.
If they're running certified Android; otherwise it doesn't matter.
It is only for registered developers, so of course that very much depends on the registration system.
quentindanjou•about 22 hours ago
I remember not long ago arguing that having Chromium become a monopoly was a bad thing, as it would mean Google could totally twist the web standard in something much more closed. I think this is a prime example.
0xbadcafebee•about 19 hours ago
I want Google to lock down their platform. Hardcore locked down. So locked down you can't do anything with it at all. Because people need motivation to do something hard.
Android has been a bloated walled garden for years. It should have been like a PC w/Windows or Linux: anyone should be able to make an app (any way they want), publish it, let anyone who wants to download it & run it. But that was never the plan. The plan was to provide a moat to allow mobile telephone operators (& Google) to dictate what users were allowed to do with their phones. Imagine your ISP having total control over your desktop computer. Or killing a website, or program, because the ISP doesn't like it.
It is insane that we, the people giving them the money and agency to do this, that we've allowed this to be the status quo. We need to do something about it. We need to kill Android. And from the ashes, make a new platform that works for us, and not for a corporation's profits and anti-competition.
edg5000•about 10 hours ago
It's really a cultural disease to accept this. From my other comment:
> I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They['ve come to] hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can't fight Google alone; it's pointless to resist.
*minor edit in brackets
FrojoS•about 11 hours ago
Reminds me of this scene from Andor:
-----
Luthen: Turning back will be impossible. You knew where this was going. You've always knew. Has anyone ever made a weapon that wasn't used? The network has been built. It's up. It grows or it dies. We've waited long enough.
Mon: Do you realise what you've set in motion?
Luthen: It was time for that as well.
Mon: Palpatine won't hestiate now.
Luthen: Exactly. We need it. We need the fear. We need them to over-react.
Mon: You can't be serious!
Luthen: The empire has been choking us so slowly we're starting not to notice. The time has come to force their hand.
Mon: People will suffer!
Luthen: That's the plan. You're not angry with me. I'm just saying out loud what you already know. There will be no rules going forward. If you're not willing to risk your conscious then surrender and be done with.
> Imagine your ISP having total control over your desktop computer. Or killing a website, or program, because the ISP doesn't like it.
It's not very hard to imagine? Most people don't expect that level of control anymore; their desktop just updates with whatever corporate slopware is pushed out seasonally. Websites come-and-go. It's not a hugely motivating rally-cry for average person.
> We need to kill Android. And from the ashes, make a new platform that works for us, and not for a corporation's profits and anti-competition.
Android is the best-working part of that equation. Microsoft supported Android apps on Windows Phone. Jolla supports Android apps on Sailfish OS. Linux supports Android apps in Waydroid. You don't have to "kill" Android as a runtime or smartphone OS; just force Google to compete with 3rd party ROMs.
0xbadcafebee•about 14 hours ago
> just force Google to
How exactly are you going to force Google to do something?
vhanda•about 11 hours ago
They way we usually do, by restricting their access to EU markets unless they comply and/or fine them, and/or threats about nationalizing the "EU Google".
What is the US going to do, apply more tariffs?
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paxys•1 day ago
The fundamental problem is that we are relying on the good graces of Google to keep Android open, despite the fact that it often runs run contrary to their goals as a $4T for-profit behemoth. This may have worked in the past, but the "don't be evil" days are very far behind us.
I don't see a real future for Andrioid as an open platform unless the community comes together and does a hard fork. Google can continue to develop their version and go the Apple way (which, funny enough, no one has a problem with). Development of AOSP can be controlled by a software foundation, like tons of other successful projects.
handity•1 day ago
A hard fork doesn't matter when the vast majority of phones have a locked bootloader.
cogman10•1 day ago
Yeah, that's the biggest issue. And it all originally stemed from phone carriers wanting to lock customers into their services.
We need some pro-consumer regulations on hardware which mandate open platforms. Fat chance of that happening, though, as the likes of both the EU and US want these locked down systems so they put in mandatory backdoors.
notorandit•1 day ago
The other big issue is the closed source binary only drivers for almost everything.
paxys•1 day ago
Google's own phones do not have a locked booloader. You can buy a Pixel and put GrapheneOS on it in like 10 minutes. But basically no one does this, because no matter what people say in online forums they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.
Affric•about 19 hours ago
It's the nature of free software.
The reason GNU and Linux won was because they produced software that was sufficient for the market: servers.
The software is also sufficiently good for a PC for software development.
There's almost sufficient software for PC gaming (up against an absolutely insane monopoly that is Microsoft).
Phones are slightly different and for something more than a dumb phone you need great hardware; great software; and great integration.
Employee computers for companies and general home users or tablets? Still a ways to go.
I don't think wanting features and good UX is unreasonable from consumers.
gonzalohm•1 day ago
That's probably their next target once android is fully locked down
themafia•about 19 hours ago
> no matter what people say in online forums
The people who speak in forums are a minority.
> they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.
There's no actual competition so we don't know this on any level.
catlikesshrimp•about 24 hours ago
A google tax which google's grace bestows upon us for as long as its whim want.
gary_0•about 24 hours ago
Even if locked bootloaders weren't a thing, not being able to just buy a phone with an open Android pre-installed means it would get relegated to the Linux Zone, with a whole lot of "security alert" and "device not supported". Also, low popularity leads to fewer development resources, so it would probably suffer from lack of polish.
emsign•about 23 hours ago
People will keep using the OS their phone comes with and that would be Google's Android. It's worse than with Windows PCs and Windows to be honest because phones have a locked bootloader.
jszymborski•about 24 hours ago
People give a lot of flack to the EU, but this is the sort of thing they would regulate.
budududuroiu•about 17 hours ago
The Italian digital ID wallet is already in fact banning GrapheneOS and other ROMs [1], the EU doesn't mandate that member states have to allow non-Android/iOS apps [2]
Or the fact that you need device drivers for every piece of hardware in a phone.
DaSHacka•about 18 hours ago
Yep, exactly why I've always supported the adoption of GPLv3. What point is there to FOSS if you cant use it?
microtonal•1 day ago
A hard fork is not needed. Non-Google Android do not have to enforce this requirement. It's more important to get as many people on alternatives like GrapheneOS as possible. And fund them by donating to them. If every ~0.5 million GrapheneOS users donated 10 Euro per month, they would be very well-funded.
paxys•1 day ago
There is no such thing as non-Google Android. At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.
It's the same as the situation with Chrome/Chromium. There are a million "de-Googled"/"privacy focused" alternatives to Chrome all using the same engine, and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.
microtonal•1 day ago
At most you have people applying tiny patches on top of AOSP, but 100% of the code in the underlying project is still Google-approved, and none of the alternatives have control over that.
You are making an orthogonal point. Yes, Google maintains AOSP. No, that does not mean that AOSP OSes that are not in Google's Android program (calling it that to avoid semantics games) have to adopt this change. If you want to hear it from the experts: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116103732687045013
Tharre•1 day ago
> and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.
That's just objectively wrong, both Brave and Opera still support manifest v2 and are committed to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Even Edge apparently still has it, funnily enough.
anonzzzies•about 24 hours ago
Get a large phone vendor to get a flagship phone with Graphene or so on the market. Otherwise nothing will happen. Even starting with the smaller ones like Blackview would do something. But almost no one will do that because users are said to want android; like my parents care... But they will care of course when their banking app stops working... That is the real issue imho.
apitman•about 23 hours ago
Google's moat with Android is the same as it's moat with Chrome: complexity. There are very few entities that could fork Android.
palata•about 23 hours ago
What about the Android SDK? I don't think that this is open source, is it? As a developer, when you download an Android SDK you have accept a licence that is not open source, right?
maxloh•about 14 hours ago
Yeah. It is [1]. Surprisingly, Android Studio is open source too [2].
The answer has to come from anti trust legislation. Android is too big for Google to control.
surajrmal•about 23 hours ago
Under what law is that a legal or ethical thing to do? Why not suggest ios be taken away from Apple as well and windows from Microsoft?
rezonant•about 23 hours ago
I'd be fine with that too
treyd•about 16 hours ago
Those things should also happen. Users shouldn't be forced to choose between 2 dictators to drop their pants for.
Terr_•about 22 hours ago
Can you be more specific on exactly what "that" you are thinking of which would be illegal or unethical?
Parent-poster just referenced past/future legislation in general.
realusername•about 16 hours ago
I also suggest that indeed, if you can't avoid those companies it means it's time for antitrust
Tharre•1 day ago
Who else is going to maintain and develop it? It's the same issue as with Chrome, even if you force Google to give it to some other company, they're all just as bad. And it's too big and too costly to maintain for anyone else but tech giants.
The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source developers. And good luck with that.
Balinares•about 23 hours ago
I'm thinking with ever increasing seriousness: let's split any company that grows past a certain size. Each side gets a copy of the codebase and half the assets, no one who's been on the board on one side can be on the other side's board, and neither side can buy off the other. They can use the existing branding for a limited time and with a qualifier (say Google Turnip vs Google Potato) but after that it's on the strength of the new brand which they're each building and for which they're competing against each other and the rest of the market.
This is not happening in my lifetime, of course it isn't. But by god does it need to happen.
iririririr•about 24 hours ago
I welcome feature stagnation on mobile!
Every single release is a step backwards.
Android 15 cannot hold a candle to what cynogenmod did on top of android 2.3. And that's objective.
chistev•1 day ago
What is stopping a hard fork?
g947o•about 23 hours ago
The same reason nobody is doing a hard fork of Chromium.
microtonal•1 day ago
The gigantic task of maintaining and developing a mobile OS that needs to retain compatibility with AOSP/GPS anyway to tap into the huge amount of applications that are available?
It will cost a lot of money and as long as Google is still doing regular AOSP code drops, what's the point?
I would caution the decision makers on this. The line between a secure device and a useless toy is perforated and hard to see.
0x1ch•1 day ago
If I can't use banking or my NFC wallets on my phone, it has become 90% useless. The other 10% of usefulness is texting and calls, which every other phone can do.
Unfortunately, this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem.
malfist•1 day ago
90% of your usage on your phone is banking apps or NFC payments? That seems hard to believe.
pluralmonad•1 day ago
I don't know if it is generational or regional or what, but there is a solid segment of people that live in very close contact with their bank.
embedding-shape•1 day ago
That's pretty much my usage pattern too, including some group texting, the occasional call and sometimes taking photos/videos. Otherwise my phone pretty much stays in my pocket or on my table the entire day. What are you using your phone for that makes that so unbelievable?
drnick1•1 day ago
I run Graphene on my Pixel and banking apps just work. There is no Google Pay, obviously, since Google dependencies have been stripped out from the system. I just carry a credit card.
tadfisher•1 day ago
Even with the sandboxed Play Store, Google Pay disables NFC payments as it requires hardware attestation against Google's root keys.
rainmaking•1 day ago
Curve pay works!
microtonal•1 day ago
Same, some banks even proactively fix things to work on GrapheneOS when customers ask.
hparadiz•1 day ago
No idea why you are even bringing this up. It works just fine right now.
0x1ch•1 day ago
It verifiably does not on open source and free android roms like Graphene. Unsure where you're getting your info.
encom•1 day ago
>this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem
Maybe, but there's no technical reason for this. As I've mentioned before, I can do banking just fine on my Gentoo machine where the entire corpus of software on it, is FOSS and compiled by myself.
jrm4•1 day ago
To you.
Laptops exist.
pmontra•1 day ago
This is a common answer but it does not apply to at least most of Europe. Because of regulations most banks require to install their app either on iOS or Android to act as a 2FA device. One of my banks gave me a hardware device 20 years ago. When its battery dies I'll have to use their app and my fingerprint.
0x1ch•1 day ago
Have you talked or met anyone born after the 90s? Everyone banks on their phone, it's the norm not the exception.
Edit: Someone also made a good point, one of my CC's I can barely even manage without the app since the website barely works.
themafia•about 19 hours ago
The line between a phone and a computer is what has been perforated. What I need is a modem. I don't need the modem baked into a computer that has a permanently affixed screen and battery. That then pretends to be some kind of secure enclave for my deepest secrets.
"Security."
As if I'm in the government or something. Why can't the people who need military level security get their own platform? Shouldn't they just have that already?
CodeBit26•about 18 hours ago
The shift towards locked-down ecosystems is concerning for developers. Openness isn't just about freedom; it's about the longevity of the hardware we own. If we can't side-load or audit, we're just renting the device
nimbius•1 day ago
This isnt going to be a popular post because the HN crowd is very much a "China bad" crowd but I hypothesize China will likely step in and offer a fork that's compatible with open ecosystems not under the direct control of the us state department. This might be in the form of commits and investment in fdroid and pinephone, or a tiktok like alternative to the wests walled garden.
Edit: this will likely exist "uncensored" in other markets but conform to the PRCs standards and practices domestically, similarly to how tiktok operated prior to selling a version specifically taylored to US censorship and propaganda.
jerf•1 day ago
Not a chance. A fork that is under China's control, maybe, but not an "open" fork. They don't even pretend to have that as a value.
You may theoretically find it advantageous to use such a system anyhow. To a first-order approximation, the danger a government poses to you is proportional to its proximity to you. (In the interests of fairness, I will point out, so are the benefits a government may offer to you. In this case it just happens to be the dangers we are discussing.) Using the stack of a government based many thousands of miles/kilometers away from you may solve a problem for you, if you judge they are much less likely to use it against you than your local government.
But China certainly won't put out an "open" anything.
oompydoompy74•1 day ago
Not sure if you have been following the LLM space or even the emulator handhelds space, but Chinese companies have been doing great with putting out open source software lately.
odo1242•1 day ago
Or the TikTok space - TikTok got worse privacy/data collection wise after the US government intervention/acquisition.
holoduke•1 day ago
The irony is that software coming from China is a lot more open than western software. Biggest examples are huggingface models mostly coming from Chinese institutions. Its also strategicaly wise for China to go this path.
Maybe a shift to Huaweis HarmonyOS with its android compatibility layer or SailfishOS if they play their cards right.
As far as HarmonyOS i dont see many uptakes outside strict US free requirements as the other OEMs are lazy and also dont want to be locked into a competitor.
SailfishOS looks like its your time to faceplant once more , by not having a proper stratergy on monetizing on the many missteps from the current monopoly.I thonk at this point they need a leadership/biz stratergy overhaul - the tech is nice and polished, user demand is off the charts for an alternative . And they are just .. missing. Not even in th e conversation.
aembleton•about 23 hours ago
As of version 5, HarmonyOS doesn't have the Android compatibility layer. There are emulators that allow APKs to run, but they're a bit clunky.
rzerowan•about 21 hours ago
Ah if they can get the emulators to the level that Rosetta worked on OSX would be acceptable for hardto port apps.
ge96•1 day ago
Pinephone is tragic, bought a bunch of Pine64's devices (PP, PPP, PB, PBuds, arm tablet, eInk tablet) but old tech, missing drivers, can't blame em no money no drivers... Still the community on Discord is great/helpful people.
dangus•1 day ago
I don’t think China will do that at all. They’ll move to HarmonyOS.
realusername•1 day ago
As far as I know, China forbids open bootloaders on its territory so it's not where you'll see any open ecosystem.
Not Google controlled for sure but also not open.
themafia•about 19 hours ago
> a "China bad" crowd
Government bad. Big government worse.
aeve890•1 day ago
That'd be great but I'm not feeling like the Chinese market is too worried about open development. I got a Huawei Watch 5 as a gift and I liked it enough to try to develop my own apps (their app store is a wasteland) but to my surprise Harmony OS is not Android compatible (just Android based somehow). The watch's developer mode is useless. Trying to register a developer account is almost impossible and it seems they only allow chinese nationals and there's no plan to open registration. I couldn't even download their custom IDE (something like Android Studio) without an account.
Maybe it's just my experience.
2OEH8eoCRo0•about 23 hours ago
Competition needs to come from somewhere due to lack of antitrust enforcement in the US. If not China then hopefully elsewhere.
The US system is dying from lack of competition.
encom•1 day ago
I would rather put my phone in the microwave than run Chinese Communist Party OS.
lm28469•1 day ago
Half, or more, of the world thinks exactly the same in regards to the US
Ir0nMan•1 day ago
If 50% of the world started running the CCP backed fork and 50% of the world ran the US backed fork, which one would you choose for your phone?
rudhdb773b•about 14 hours ago
Why? If I had to choose, I'd much rather use a phone controlled by a jurisdiction in which I don't live or have any business.
Atlas667•1 day ago
Meanwhile the NSA and Mossad can see you fapping on your phone and scan your face in real time and you're implicitly fine with it
This is what lack of options does to a MF
pixelready•1 day ago
Yeah, I’m amazed at how far the western surveillance apparatus has been able to coast on plausible deniability. Folks, please don’t stick your head in the sand domestically just because there’s an even more obvious or egregious example abroad.
Say it with me: “Living in a police state is bad no matter who’s running it”.
hparadiz•1 day ago
This made me laugh cause of how true it is.
xvilka•about 11 hours ago
A good opportunity to donate[1] to the GrapheneOS[2].
This is sad as there’s been a real resurgence of gaming devices (Ayn Thor/Odin, Retroid pocket devices, Ayaneo, etc) moving to Android from Linux variants (Batocera, Arc, Garlic/OnionOS).
It’s sad but more of an incentive for folks to finally take Linux as a viable alternative, and build on efforts made by Valve with SteamOS.
Synaesthesia•about 7 hours ago
The government has to step in and regulate. In China the regulation specify that Google cannot preload a whole bunch of apps on the device. It's perfectly reasonable. The government is picking the side of huge corporations ahead of people. So the people need to make some kid if a mass movement to rebel.
budududuroiu•about 17 hours ago
Maybe stupid question, we keep seeing "LLM figures out math problem humans couldn't, LLM finds security vulnerability by looking at hexdumps for 6 months straight. How hard or expensive would it be to let some LLMs loose on reverse engineering all the proprietary driver binary blobs?
People mentioning forking Android is hard, how easy do LLMs make this?
skue•about 11 hours ago
How do Google and Apple plan to deal with the immense influx of personal apps that AI will help non developers build?
Recently, I was thinking that AI might force Apple to open their devices, because if Apple’s competitor allows sideloading, then the creatives and builders most likely to build their own apps will migrate to the platform providing less friction to getting custom apps onto their device. But apparently THIS is the time that Google has chosen to start locking down their devices as well?!
IshKebab•about 11 hours ago
AI is not yet at the point where non-developers could use it to build useful apps. I've tried. It gave me a good start that saved me a ton of time setting things up but the result was buggy and had a lot of bad code, so I still had to read and understand it all and fix the issues.
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largbae•about 17 hours ago
Does the AI boom help with this? Can we donate enough token-budget for GrapheneOS to maintain a fully functional fork?
okanat•about 9 hours ago
You are overinflating how useful AI is. Moreover most FOSS people actually don't want any AI written code unless the human driving it has done equivalent amount of work understanding and designing it from scratch.
cube00•about 13 hours ago
Good luck, no bank will touch a non-Google blessed platform with a 10 ft pole.
mindaslab•about 13 hours ago
Never has evil yielded when you appeal to it.
Catagris•about 18 hours ago
If they go through with this I am switching to iPhone because there at least I am told up front and am tried less like the a product to be sold to advertisers.
rrix2•about 21 hours ago
it's becoming ever more clear to me that i'll have at least two devices: one running software i trust, one running software corporates trust, with a very narrow pipeline connecting the two, if it all. my demon-haunted device can stay offline in my bag and get hotspot'd in to my trustworthy device as necessary.
not happy about it, but i don't see a path forward that lets one participate in the wider ecosystem and maintain their own sovereignty and sanity.
DesaiAshu•about 23 hours ago
The biggest surprise I had in attempting to distribute my first Android app is how difficult it is to get beta-testers through the "standard" channels. It requires a 1 week review and 25 beta-users invited by email addresses
In contrast, Apple has a ~48 hour turnaround for reviews before you can upload to TestFlight and distribute a beta with a link
Not sure if I am in some "trusted developer" cohort on iOS but not Android - but the difference was enough for me to stop trying on Android
Amusingly, if Microsfot didn't have a such an awful reputation ( both recent and old ), their newly announced phones could have actually been a viable competitor.
ddxv•about 19 hours ago
I've finally started de-googling and removing google from my life as much as I can. It's difficult with how much of everything is soaked in Google. I'm sure other's here have gotten much further, but everything you do to reduce their monopoly control helps.
hungryhobbit•about 23 hours ago
I question whether an OS that has always been controlled by Google has ever been open.
Sure parts of it were, but Google has always remained in control of Android. Anyone who expected that to change (in favor of more openness) hasn't been paying attention to the actions of tech companies for the past several decades.
davidw•about 23 hours ago
The relative openness is the reason I gravitated towards Android and Google. I've never really taken advantage of it, but it's nice knowing it's there and that my phone (a Google Pixel) is something I have more control over than with other vendors.
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aagha•about 23 hours ago
This is where I wish someone like MKBHD and others with big Android followings would speak up and say they will both blast this practice and not review any new Android phones/(Google) apps unless there's a full walk-back of this position.
snowhale•about 22 hours ago
the frustrating part is that the "advanced flow" alternative Google mentioned still doesn't exist in practice. the media ran with the reassurance headline and most people think the issue was resolved.
So how is Ubuntu touch doing these days? I keep meaning to try it, but never get around to it!
fsflover•about 11 hours ago
Mobian and postmarketOS are more advanced and work more like GNU/Linux.
dvh•1 day ago
EU should fork Android
G_o_D•about 18 hours ago
Whats Andy Rubins take on this ? The original developer/contributor to android os itself
mhher•about 7 hours ago
I need to check if Aurora Store still exists/works.
emsign•about 22 hours ago
Since smartphone apps are often times required to do banking or identifying yourself now and there's tons of special apps in order to use appliances, and by that I mean really the only way to use modern appliances is by a smartphone app, emulating an Android environment on a laptop or PC with a bluetooth dongle is essential if you want to leave that smartphone era behind you for good, but still be able to function in this society.
fredgrott•1 day ago
What people forget is that the real monopoly is in how the AOSP hardware OEM contract is written....
Remember how hard Amazon had it to attempt an Android fork?
I was due to OEM SOC access being locked out due to those contracts....
Any open source mobile OS attempting to complete with AOSP needs access to mobile OEM soc providers not touched by AOSP contracts and currently that is somewhat hard.
Seattle3503•about 23 hours ago
Should device manufacturers be worried about this direction? Could they eventually be locked out too?
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anon_anon12•about 19 hours ago
APKs were the only reason why I was using android in the first place
b00ty4breakfast•1 day ago
The Control Society is way lamer than I could have imagined. Deleuze! I demand a refund!
cadamsdotcom•about 23 hours ago
What would it take for Linux phones to gain the ability to run Android apps?
zb3•1 day ago
Android was never open. User apps are limited, only system apps can do X which means third party apps can't compete with Google and this is not a coincidence.
Let's focus on making it possible to use really open Linux systems on smartphones.
gf000•1 day ago
There are some functionality limited to google play services, but it really is not too much in my opinion.
vsviridov•1 day ago
The amount of open stuff that was migrated into the Play Services closed source blob over the years just keeps growing.
tadfisher•about 24 hours ago
I still can't comprehend why they implemented FIDO/WebAuthn support in Play Services. Passkeys are extremely difficult to support in apps that don't depend on Play Services client libraries.
zb3•1 day ago
I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I was talking about the whole permissions system where the user is a third class citizen. Device manufacturers are second class citizens (restricted by Google via CDD/CTS) and the only true winner on that system is Google.
Regarding some concrete examples - Google can deeply integrate Gemini, but a competitor can't do this and users get no final say here either. Competitors are restricted by the permission system, Google is not restricted at all.
While rooting can alleviate this to some extent, Play Integrity is there to make sure the user regrets that decision to break free..
qiine•about 22 hours ago
The number one problem is locked hardware
briandear•about 11 hours ago
Why doesn’t the market respond? If people don’t like Android, it seems like a market opportunity to make another OS. People love to complain about Apple and Google’s “monopoly,” but doesn’t that present an opportunity for someone to build their own thing and if enough people want it, they will be able to sell it?
jajuuka•about 23 hours ago
>But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issue
A bit ironic to not believe Google is doing this. The same questions have same answers when asked about when Google is locking down side loading. A bit self-serving to pick and choose which things you want to believe are happening.
Macha•about 23 hours ago
Google made the first move with their initial plan to lock it down, so the onus is on Google to calm the fears they caused if they don't want people to distrust them.
jajuuka•about 14 hours ago
But they did. That was the announcement that they would still allow sideloading. If you are still afraid then that's kind of on you. Seems silly to expect Google to put out info about enabling sideloading for a system they haven't even released yet. It could very well be in there day 1. Nobody knows.
okanat•about 3 hours ago
Google needs to put hard evidence that they are doing it. Sorry but just saying something isn't enough proof. Talk is cheap show us the code.
aussieguy1234•about 12 hours ago
We need viable Linux on phones now more than ever. I'll keep using GrapheneOS in the meantime.
gethly•1 day ago
Just like Microsoft screwed up Windows, Google will screw up Android and people will move to Linux on PCs and some open version of Android, or Harmony, or whatever new mobile system comes up, on their phones.
Nothing lasts for ever. The sooner you make the switch, the better off you will be.
On desktop, unknown OS cannot be anything else but Linux, so that's 20% altogether(16%+4%). But that does not matter. The shift has started last year when W10 support ended and due to how bad W11 is and it is just getting stronger and stronger. Watch increase in YT videos about moving from Windows to Linux, or social networks in general. You cannot miss it. I've been on windows since 95, before that DOS. So that is three decades of being a loyal customer, so to speak. Even though I tried Linux in the past, Windows just works so I had no reason to switch.
With W11, that is not the case. Therefore, it becomes inevitable. Worth mentioning is that companies, governments and whole countries are ditching Microsoft altogether - for various reasons(some are geopolitical, due to sanctions and tariffs, others are technical).
Lenovo, Dell and HP are slowly ditching W11 as well in favour of linux. If you look up definitions of malware and spyware, windows 11 falls into both of them. It's that bad. So again, I'm not a linux fanboy by any stretch of imagination, but the writing is not just on the wall, we've passed the point of no return. Or rather, Microsoft has.
Now that linux supports 95% of games, there is little holding people back as gaming was always the biggest hurdle when it came to linux. And Adobe, too, is no longer what keeps people stuck on Windows - either because they ditched it due to their horrible pricing practices, or because there are now solid alternatives.
Of course many people will switch to mac as well. But windows in general, i think, is done. It had a good run for few decades, but they dropped the ball so hard that there is no going back or fixing it with w12.
keeda•about 2 hours ago
All these points are brought up all the time but the upshot is, based on reporting from Microsoft and StatCounter, Windows marketshare actually grew.
Point is, we techies might chafe at and complain about all these anti-consumer shenanigans (Meta and privacy, anyone?) but it does not affect their business momentum, probably because the rest of the world just doesn't care.
foobiekr•about 22 hours ago
What is the advantage of moving sooner vs. moving later when rough spots have been smoothed over?
gethly•about 12 hours ago
You keep hoping things won't get too bad, but they will. You just keep delaying the inevitable. So it's better to switch now to get the initial hurdles of such a big change over with as soon as possible. It's not easy, getting used to completely strange behaviours and new things in general. Abandoning what worked for you for years for something completely foreign. You have to force yourself to withstand the first few days or week(s), but then it becomes the new normal and you'll be fine.
Personally, I am still on W10 and and delaying the move, so i'm not holier than thou. It's tough. But I also am a programmer/power user and am on my PC 24/7, sort of, so this disruption must be timed properly for me to make the move, which is not necessarily the case for most people/average users.
Phone on the other hand, as long as it works and does not limit me, I have no need to use different ROM, it's more of a want. But i do not see me doing anything until the system stops being supported or it breaks or something else. So it depends on how you use it.
martin-t•about 22 hours ago
Crazy idea: when companies change their product, they have to change the name.
Do you ever feel like the same food item doesn't taste the same it did 10 years ago? Maybe it's your memory being faulty or maybe the company got new management which decided to cut costs while keeping prices, extract the differential value from customer inertia and move on when the product stops being profitable.
Android is the same. Certain freedoms were a part of the offering - a part of the brand name. They no longer are. Not only should lose their trademark[0], they should be legally forced to change the name.
[0]: The purpose of which is to identify genuine product from counterfeits - in this case, the counterfeit just happens to be by the same company which released the original product.
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01HNNWZ0MV43FF•1 day ago
> We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth
You must find truth. Lies will find you.
306bobby•about 20 hours ago
Looks like I'm staying in my custom ROM lol
stackghost•1 day ago
From a marketing standpoint it seems like a baffling decision on Google's part.
I own a Pixel and while the hardware seems decent, I've had a buggy and annoying experience with Android, and it's been getting worse lately.
Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good. That's like Microsoft thinking people use Teams because of its merits.
People buy Android phones because they can be had cheaper than an equivalent iPhone and because in spite of the buggy and inconsistent mess of an OS, you aren't beholden to Apple's regimented UX. Locking down Android will not give it a "premium experience"... It'll always just be "Temu iOS" at best.
drnick1•1 day ago
Have you considered Graphene since you own a Pixel? It's a huge upgrade over the stock OS in terms of security, privacy and general reduction of bloat.
stackghost•1 day ago
Yep it's definitely on my list but my Pixel is on its last legs and I'm considering going back to iOS.
microtonal•1 day ago
Having just gone from an iPhone as my main phone to a Pixel with GrapheneOS, GrapheneOS is such a breath of fresh air. No constant push of AI, iCloud services, etc. plus I actually feel owner of my phone and not living on some feudal landlord's plot.
GrapheneOS is great!
drnick1•1 day ago
I urge you not too. iOS is fully locked down -- Apple won't allow you to exert control over the hardware that you bought and own, it's shocking.
gf000•1 day ago
> "Temu iOS"
Come on, that's absolutely laughable.
There are several topics where Android is significantly ahead to the point that iOS is just a toy, and there are areas where the reverse is true.
And I say that as a recent convert, so it's not like I have a decade out of date view of any of the OSs. In my experience I had more visual bugs in case of iOS than android (volume slider not displaying correctly in certain cases when the content was rotated as a very annoying example).
stackghost•1 day ago
>Come on, that's absolutely laughable.
It's not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices.
It's going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of "phone calls only mode" and forced us to rely on their half-baked "priority mode" that's an opaque shitshow.
When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
malfist•1 day ago
> Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices
Pixel Fold disagrees.
> When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
You can do that with do not disturb.
> Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
That is your opinion. My opinion is different.
drnick1•1 day ago
> Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
Android is good, but Googled Android is not. You should check out GrapheneOS to see what Android done properly looks like.
Zak•about 24 hours ago
You can definitely make a "phone calls only" mode: create a mode, allow certain apps to interrupt, and add only phone calls to the list.
I do think they should offer more pre-configured notification modes by default, if only to show people what they can do with the feature. Perhaps "phone calls only" should be one of those.
gf000•1 day ago
I'm talking about the OS though.
franga2000•1 day ago
People buy high-end Android phones like crazy, I don't know what bubble you live in. Samsung Folds and Flips are the luxury phones, not the iPhone Pro Max S eXtreme Edition 32 GB that looks exactly like the base model but has a slightly better camera. People show off their S Pen and perfectly stabilised 100x zoom lens, not their liquid ass. Multi-window and DeX are features for professionals who need to Get Shit Done^TM, iPhones are the toys kids use to send memojis to each other.
And yes, I can also click one button and go into phone calls only mode. I can even set it on a schedule or based on my calendar. I don't know where you're getting your half-baked Android, mine Just Works.
You might not agree with every one of those points, but you can't seriously think everyone thinks like you. Go outside your bubble some time.
StopDisinfo910•1 day ago
> Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good
Honestly having gone back and forth between iOS and Android every three years or so, both OS are the same. It's not like the grass is really greener on the Apple side. The UX is virtually identical for anything that matters. Personally I put material Android above liquid glass iOS. The alleged polish of the Apple UX was lost on me when I had my last iphone.
The reason Google's moves are surprising has more to do with them embracing being a service player more and more with the arrival of Gemini and them having regulators breathing down their necks everywhere.
I guess they did it after the truly baffling US decision in the Epic trial but it's very likely to go against them in the EU.
tadfisher•1 day ago
The rumors that I have heard (and one government document I read that was poorly translated from Thai) is that there are some countries who are pressuring Google on this to combat info-stealing malware. Apparently, account-takeover/theft is very prevalent in SE Asia where most banking is done via Android phones.
StopDisinfo910•1 day ago
Maybe but lobbying is extremely strong in SE Asia. It's hard to distinguish from governments putting pressure for something and companies suggesting it would be a good idea.
Atlas667•1 day ago
Capitalism is the privatization of human needs. As long as these tech platforms are owned privately they will be used to police and make money.
This view NEEDS to be central to the tech freedom rhetoric, else the whole movement is literally just begging politicians and hoping corporations do the right thing... useless.
nazgulsenpai•1 day ago
Aren't the politicians or their appointed bureaucrats who'd be making all the decisions if these needs were government owned? Why would state control lead to less policing? What incentive structure would lead to innovation without a profit motive, when even the modern communist world relies on capital markets?
(these are honest questions and not "gotcha")
Atlas667•1 day ago
> Aren't the politicians or their appointed bureaucrats who'd be making all the decisions if these needs were government owned?
Well that would be true under a capitalist government.
> Why would state control lead to less policing?
Its not just "the state runs it", its "we actively become the state".
Collective ownership through peoples councils, peoples courts with a world view that keeps it all open: socialism.
The world view of not allowing individual ownership over collective goods, the world view of socialism, is the life line of the movement. The actual practice of daily democracy, of running production and of deciding social functions is everyones responsibility and it should not be left to what has become a professional class of liars.
Public office members, which should only exist where absolutely necessary, should be locals and serve as messengers with 0 decision making power. All power should be in the local councils. We can mathematically implement this today (0 knowledge proofs).
Every single book on socialism is on theory and practices of acheiving this. Thats what the "dictatorship of the proletariat is", the dictatorship of working people, collectively.
> What incentive structure would lead to innovation without a profit motive, when even the modern communist world relies on capital markets?
We've been innovating for hundreds of thousands of years before capitalism. You dont need to generate money to innovate, the innovation itself is the driver, AKA a better life. No need to lock and limit production behind the attaining of profits of those who lead it.
nazgulsenpai•1 day ago
Thanks for responding.
mistercheph•1 day ago
Copyleft fixes this.
Atlas667•1 day ago
They have the incentive to never chose this.
If we force it upon them by begging politicians, corporations still have the incentive to find a way to remove it or circumvent it.
Youre playing the cat and mouse game because you've been taught that solving it is too extreme (thats not a coincidence).
We dont need to endlessly fight a whole class of people, capitalists, for them not to use the things we require against us. Only socialism can solve that.
jackyard86•about 16 hours ago
I visited change.org to sign the petition for them, only to get spammed by far-right extremist propagandas supporting nazism like this: https://imgur.com/a/E6LMUcB
I regret giving my real name and e-mail address to that website now.
Fairphone 4 looks close, hopefully fairphone 4 support will continue to improve at this rate. Pinephone is another close one, but underpowered hardware and camera support kills it.
I am not even that intensive of a phone user. but there is no way I could daily drive pmOS.
CodeBit26•about 24 hours ago
Good thing
oybng•1 day ago
>F-Droid Basic
Great, now they can spread themselves even thinner. Just revert the entire trash rewrite from years ago. Problem solved
Discussion (649 Comments)
> We appreciate the community's engagement and have heard the early feedback – specifically from students and hobbyists who need an accessible path to learn, and from power users who are more comfortable with security risks. We are making changes to address the needs of both groups.
> We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.
> Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months.
It is also true that they have not updated their developer documentation site and still assert that developer verification will be "required" in September 2026 [1]. Which might be true by some nonsensical definition of "required" if installing unverified apps requires an "advanced flow", but let's not give too much benefit of the doubt here.
0: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
1: https://developer.android.com/developer-verification
In classic Google fashion, they hear the complaint, pretend that it's about something else, and give a half baked solution to that different problem that was not the actual issue. Any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.
I should have the right to have parents, friends or anyone use a "free" store that is not under control of Google if the user and app developer wish so. But also, somehow there should be something done to avoid the monopoly forcing to use the Google services. Like major institutions like bank, gov and co being forced to provide alternatives like a webapp when they provide app tied to the Google play store.
Yes, but we also need to stop thinking like we’re trying to please the ghost of Steve Jobs. There is no ”store”. There are installers. You distribute them how you see fit, probably through the web.
These ”alternative stores” angle is a controlled dissent corporate plan B, much like how recycling was propped up by the fossil fuel industry.
The EU and every other nation with digital sovereignty concerns need to make this happen to both Apple and Google.
These are our devices. The giants are camping.
This was already the case for enabling sideloading at system level: it warned you. Nobody really says having this toggle is a bad thing, basically the user shouldn't get an ad network installing apk's just browsing around the web without their informed consent (and android has been found to be vulnerable to popunder style confirmations in the past).
They also already had the PlayProtect scanning thing that scans sideloaded APK's for known malware and removes it. People already found this problematic since what's to stop them pulling off apps they just don't like, and no idea what if any telemetry it sends back about what you have installed. There have been a handful of cases where it proved beneficial pulling off botnet stuff.
Finally, they also have an additional permission per-application that needs to be enabled to install APK's. This stops a sketchy app from installing an APK again without user consent to install APK's.
The question is: How many other hurdles are going to be put in place? Are you going to have to do a KYC with Google and ping them for every single thing you want to install? Do you see how this gets to be a problem?
I've lived through them locking down a11y settings "to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer", and it's a nightmare. It's not just some scare text, it's a convoluted process that explicitly prevents you from just opening the settings and allowing access. I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt; after they actually show what their supposed solution is we can discuss it, but precedent is against them.
> Seems reasonable?
No. As I said before, any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.
That describes the current (and long-established) behavior. App installation is only from Google's store by default and the user has to manually enable each additional source on a screen with scare text.
Even that is a step too far in the wrong direction. Doesn't matter if it's free, or whatever, simply requiring an account at all to create and run software on your own device (or make it available to others) is wrong.
There exists no freedom when you are required to verify your identity, or even just provide any personal information whatsoever, to a company to run software on your device that you own.
> We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth, and having journalists just copy/paste Google posts serves no one.
> But Google said… Said what? That there’s a magical “advanced flow”? Did you see it? Did anyone experience it? When is it scheduled to be released? Was it part of Android 16 QPR2 in December? Of 16 QPR3 Beta 2.1 last week? Of Android 17 Beta 1? No? That’s the issue… As time marches on people were left with the impression that everything was done, fixed, Google “wasn’t evil” after all, this time, yay!
Perhaps this, when shipped, will pave the way for sane regulation of Apple’s practices along these lines, too.
Google listened.
Blame the judge for one of the worst legal calls in recent history. Google is a monopoly and Apple is not. Simple fix for Google...
If Google had not done that, they wouldn't have lost.
Then, at least I control my hardware and my OS.
It's just nasty to have your device and OS controlled by an antagonistic entity.
I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can't fight Google alone; it's pointless to resist.
https://furilabs.com/
https://jolla.com/
https://pine64.org/devices/pinephone/
It's been our choice to drink this glass of wishful thinking while giving that company a solid dominant position in the market.
We ("you") can only make choices that will overturn that trend.
Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.
My smartphone runs an FSF-endorsed OS, PureOS. This is reality. It's not open hardware, but it's a long way from Android in the right direction. You can also get a Precursor, which is open hardware.
MSFT Market cap: 2.951T AAPL Market cap: 3.883T
To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an "advanced flow" for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe.
But this promised feature hasn't appeared in any Android 16 or 17 betas. Google is quietly proceeding with the original lockdown.
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
Tragically, Linux phones have languished and are in an absolute state these days, but a lot of the building blocks are in place if user adoption occurs en masse. (Shout out to the lunatics who have kept this dream alive during these dark years.)
I know banking apps are the typical example, but I've always wondered why. I use my bank's app maybe once or twice a year when I need to Zelle someone, which I only need to do when they don't have Venmo. (Unless we consider Venmo a banking app.)
I only have one bank's app installed, the rest of my banks I only interact with over their website, on desktop.
As for insurance, I've never had an insurance company's app installed.
Am I just an outlier here? Honestly, if I switched to a non standard OS, I'd be more annoyed about losing, say, Google Maps, Uber/Lyft, or various chat apps. Banking and insurance just don't come to mind at all as something I need my phone for.
Make sure to leave one star reviews on all such apps that you run into.
You can have a separate core and kernel to run such code. They don't have to be powerful, but they'll need to be small enough to be verified by the said provider. For most of the code that doesn't need attestation, they can be executed on normal hardware.
The provider also has to convince the regulator or banks to trust them. However, if that's solved, the user should feel no difference between pure Android and alternative platform plus attestation.
Soon we Europians will only be able to pay using either an iphone or an Android device.
Hilarious
Decentralized banking is the future!
INB4 someone mentions some edge case like 'grandma got scammed' or refunds.
https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...
Some banks have added their verified boot keys. I think it helps that GrapheneOS is well-known by now for great security practices (most likely more secure than all vendor phones out there).
Of course, now Google is doing what Google was always going to do.
[0]https://e.foundation/installer/
If you can install a linux distro you can flash a custom rom on a well-supported phone.
If it were more mainstream I could see GUI apps to manage all this for people, if they don't already exist. Idk I just use adb.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46723594 from Emre @emrekosmaz
It is a smartphone that runs Android, launches Debian, and dual-boots Windows 11
Actual link https://nexphone.com/blog/the-tale-of-nexphone-one-phone-eve...
What you're saying should happen, but it will only happen when the government legislates it happens; which frankly they should be doing (along with nationalizing a few other software projects to be fair).
A trillion dollar transnational corporation with massive monopolistic tendencies will never ever do the right thing. Expect to force feed it down their throats.
Besides having terrible battery life and security, it's just a hobby thing. Android has had millions of dev hours poured into it to be what it is.
Sent from my Librem 5.
It won't.
Nothing about Android is open except the absolutely minimum amount of linux kernel that's required to boot the thing. Then it's blobs and restrictions all the way to the screen.
I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:
https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116103...
So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.
Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace
I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social
Not even playing devil's advocate, just wondering how many loopholes actually exist.
While MS code signing certs are more circumventable for power-users than Android's new approved developer program, their pricing is far more prohibitive for independent OSS developers and hobbyists, costing hundreds of USD per year.
It's really a shame that you always wait until you really get forced. Particularly in situations when every individual's inability has consequences for the others as well. I really gave up all ideas of a better world. With this community, the best you can hope is that the decay will be slow.
So everyone who would describe himself/herself as a FOSS enthusiast, or at least a friend of a somewhat open system where the user has some actual rights beyond sole consumption, put some pressure towards having actually de-Googled systems. A system that mostly comes from Google, would not fit my definition of that term at all! Even if they removed some parts of it. It's an euphemism. And it's dangerous because you constantly get trapped by these euphemisms. Ever. Single. F'ing. Time.
I developed my own Android ROMs from 2009-2011, complete with my own tuned kernel. I ran the local Android developers MeetUp group and evangelised Android development. When Honeycomb launched I helped OEMs test their beta firmware. For free.
But as Google has become certified Evil, the direction of Android has been very clear. In practice I honestly can’t say it’s now any more open than iOS. Except it has a lot more avenues for Google to mine your data to sell ads. And the quality of third party apps on it is decidedly worse.
I thought long and hard about getting a Linux phone. But I need a good camera on my phone to take random snaps of kids/pets/etc. And the Linux phones just aren’t there.
I hate the shitty duopoly we have ended up with. But I now realise that the openness of x86 and pc as platform really was an accident of history.
Later we got a new one: to reveal Russian shills/propaganda bots
Now we also have: to filter out AI slop
Any problem the internet experiences will eventually become an excuse to eliminate online anonymity.
I honestly can’t imagine a good solution here. A move back to the early 2000s internet would be the ideal middle ground, which requires separating social stuff from informational stuff, and both from engagement algorithms. I have no idea how we’re supposed to put that genie back in the bottle.
And to be clear I’m not saying this as vouching for the current push, I hate it as well.
"just stop" is a good solution. Stop asking for ID, stop pushing for apps, just stop the general trend towards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification .
Yes, misinformation is a problem. Deanonymization is a bigger problem. If you can't say anything anonymously, it becomes much more difficult to fight entities bigger and more powerful than you.
Hopefully 2026 or 2027 will be the year of the Linux Phone
I understand some amount of reticence with commercial OSes, but there’s no justification for being against it on open Linux based desktops and mobile OSes. We really need to get past the 90s-minded paradigm of everything having access to everything else all the time with the only (scantly) meaningful safeguards coming in the form of *nix user permissions.
The isolation is nice but not so important once you stop running malware constantly.
- AI boom or bust will affect hardware availability - there is a push on its way to revamp phones into 'what comes next' -- see various versions of the same product that listens to you ( earing, ring, necklace ) - small LLMs allow for minimal hardware requirements for some tasks - anti-institutional sentiment seems to be driving some of the adoption
Gaming on Linux took off with Proton. Linux on phones might go the same path.
However, I have 2 Linux phones and Linux on phones is just not there. Massive vendors (Samsung, Huawei, etc) would need to get behind it to make it go anywhere. Also so banking etc apps remain available also on those phones. We can already run android apps on Linux, Windows apps, so it would be a bright future but really it needs injections and support for large phone makers.
I hope the EU/US mess will give it somewhat of a push but I doubt it.
Similarly, Palm Pre, and especially HP Pre 3 was a wonderful WebOS incarnation.
Ubuntu Touch did seem like it had a future, but it was a massive sink for Canonical so it was defunded as well.
The user experience was there on all of these: the apps, not so much.
The reality is that we're lucky to have mostly-good things at all that align with most of our interests.
Yet people get so comfortable that they start to think mostly-good things are some sort of guarantee or natural order of the world.
Such that if only they could just kill off the thing that's mostly-good, they'll finally get something that's even better (or rather, more aligned with their interests rather than anyone else's).
In reality, mostly-good things that align with most of our interests is mostly a fluke of history, not something that was guaranteed to unfold.
Other common examples: capitalism, the internet, html/css, their favorite part of society (but they have ideas of how it could be a little better), some open-source project they actually use daily, etc.
If only there weren't Android, surely your set of ideals would win and nobody else's.
Also, the open nature of AOSP gave Google its advantage during the early days. Since then, Google has morphed into a company that would likely not make the same decision to create an open-source OS free for others to use and contribute to.
So in the end, what we as consumers actually get, in 2026:
- Google encourages application developers to use hardware attestation to prevent themselves from running on non-blessed, third-party AOSP distributions.
- Google builds basic functionality people care about (including passkeys!) into Play Services, a closed mega-application that happens to require a Google account for most features, and is a moving target for open distributions to mimic.
- Google has closed AOSP contributions to themselves and OEM partners only. AOSP releases are now quarterly source dumps.
- OEMs which traditionally allowed bootloader unlocking (and thus actual ownership of the hardware) have removed it as a matter of policy.
So what exactly is open about Android anymore? Does "source-available OS you can see and not touch" align with your interests? Because it's increasingly not aligned with mine.
death of personal computing freedom, sovereign compute, and probably soon our ability to meaningfully contribute to the field as ICs?
A lot of really bad things are happening to our field, and Google is one of the agents responsible for much of it.
I mean, breaking news from 2010, but of course never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
I have trouble understanding why this is a threat to AOSP distribution. I would have said quite the opposite actually, I don't see why they would not remove the verification and that's an incentive for people to use their project instead of Google Android.
I know iPhones aren't affordable for the layman in many countries. But for anyone with an option, why would you buy an Android? All the "customization" things I cared about when I was on Android are either doable on an iPhone now with better implementation, or something I don't care about.
I was a die-hard until I went through enough cycles of Google deprecating and reinventing their apps and services every year, breaking my workflow/habits, that I got sick of them and moved to Apple everything. And all the changes I've seen since then are only making me happier I got out of the ecosystem when I did. Unlimited Google Photos backups with Pixels are gone, Google Play Music is gone, the free development/distribution environment is gone, etc.
If people can't even develop for the thing without going through the Google process, they're really just a shitty iOS knockoff.
In the past I was also on Windows Phone, again great .NET based userspace, with some limited C++, moving into the future, not legacy OS design.
I can afford iPhones, but won't buy them for private use, as I am not sponsoring Apple tax when I think about how many people on this world hardly can afford a feature phone in first place.
However I also support their Swift/Objective-C userspace, without being yet another UNIX clone.
If the Linux phones are to be yet another OpenMoko with Gtk+, or Qt, I don't see it moving the needle in mainstream adoption.
How the heck this is true?!? iOS is just bad.
Its usability is bad, its interface is bad, its apps are just a ton of crap, and it _will_ keep getting worse.
I'm not even talking about its "walled concentration camp" app model.
wake me up when there's an adblocker on an iphone.
That said, I want off the iOS ecosystem, but Google has basically said guess what? We are going the way of Apple, so we don't care about you either.
So right now there isn't really anywhere else to go. I'm going to keep trucking in iOS for now, but I hope I find something better soon.
(And install GrapheneOS, the more successful open Android becomes, the better.)
- A refurbished Pixel works (except some weird Verizon locking that I heard about the other day).
- Pixels get really heavily discounted near the end of the cycle (e.g. 9a currently). Google probably doesn't make much on it if you are opting out of your ecosystem.
Supporting free competition with and within the Android market is in theory what these teams are all about so hopefully with enough voices they'll push harder on it. I'd love to see a shift here that makes non-Google/Apple-controlled mobile a possible option (even if it's a Linux-on-desktop-style niche for the foreseeable future)
If I understood correctly, to "protect" users, Google wants to control what is installed on Android phones. I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app, which in turn means: - That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps - That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc. Obviously this is awful and would mean the end of F-droid and Aurora store etc. However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something? Why do people link this app verification thing with a possible closing of AOSP?
Also, Mozilla was already saying it 10years ago with Firefox OS but... The web is the platform. 90% of the apps out there could be websites. We have all technologies needed for this including offline with service workers. And it works on every damn platform, even the most obscure OS has a web browser. Don't want to be locked to an ecosystem? Just target the web!
> I guess it means the Play store will be the only way to install an app
No, non-Play stores will still work, but developers will need to register a developer account with Google that is tied to some real identity. They already need to do this to distribute through the Play store, but now it'll apply regardless.
This is to make it harder for scam apps to churn app signatures. Kind of like requiring code-signing, but with only one CA.
> That users won't be able to install what they want
No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.
> and that they would need a google account to install apps
Nope.
> That app developers have to go through google to distribute their apps, with identity verification etc.
They don't need to distribute through Google, but they will need to be involved with Google and do identity verification.
> However, I'm also reading here and there that it is a threat to alternative ROMs. To me it sounds at the contrary as an amazing opportunity, as they can strip this verification and be the only truly open Android, or am I missing something?
You're being misinformed. They won't even need to strip the verification. The verification is only for certified Android -- OEMs that partner with Google. Custom ROMs and the OEMs that aren't certified (Amazon, some Chinese manufacturers) won't have verification.
The target audience for verification and who would ever use a custom ROM has basically zero overlap.
> > That users won't be able to install what they want
> No, sideloading will still work, but it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry.
So the user can't install what they want. They can only install stuff signed by developers Google has "approved".
Yes, in the happy situation this is everything except for developers that Google has revoked. But technically it is only approved developers.
> That users won't be able to install what they want and that they would need a google account to install apps
It was split up because "need a Google account to install apps" is strictly untrue, but "won't be able to install what they want" is more nuanced.
I did clearly say, "it won't work if the APK isn't signed by someone in the Google developer registry".
So, it depends on what the user wants.
If they're running certified Android; otherwise it doesn't matter.
It is only for registered developers, so of course that very much depends on the registration system.
Android has been a bloated walled garden for years. It should have been like a PC w/Windows or Linux: anyone should be able to make an app (any way they want), publish it, let anyone who wants to download it & run it. But that was never the plan. The plan was to provide a moat to allow mobile telephone operators (& Google) to dictate what users were allowed to do with their phones. Imagine your ISP having total control over your desktop computer. Or killing a website, or program, because the ISP doesn't like it.
It is insane that we, the people giving them the money and agency to do this, that we've allowed this to be the status quo. We need to do something about it. We need to kill Android. And from the ashes, make a new platform that works for us, and not for a corporation's profits and anti-competition.
> I see this in people why have used antagonistic software for decades and have become zombified and shellshocked; the idea that software could be on your side is to alien to them. They['ve come to] hate software and technology and just want to get some work done. They tolerate the abuse because they can't fight Google alone; it's pointless to resist.
*minor edit in brackets
-----
Luthen: Turning back will be impossible. You knew where this was going. You've always knew. Has anyone ever made a weapon that wasn't used? The network has been built. It's up. It grows or it dies. We've waited long enough.
Mon: Do you realise what you've set in motion?
Luthen: It was time for that as well.
Mon: Palpatine won't hestiate now.
Luthen: Exactly. We need it. We need the fear. We need them to over-react.
Mon: You can't be serious!
Luthen: The empire has been choking us so slowly we're starting not to notice. The time has come to force their hand.
Mon: People will suffer!
Luthen: That's the plan. You're not angry with me. I'm just saying out loud what you already know. There will be no rules going forward. If you're not willing to risk your conscious then surrender and be done with.
---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao9ARb6dEfc
edited: formatting
It's not very hard to imagine? Most people don't expect that level of control anymore; their desktop just updates with whatever corporate slopware is pushed out seasonally. Websites come-and-go. It's not a hugely motivating rally-cry for average person.
> We need to kill Android. And from the ashes, make a new platform that works for us, and not for a corporation's profits and anti-competition.
Android is the best-working part of that equation. Microsoft supported Android apps on Windows Phone. Jolla supports Android apps on Sailfish OS. Linux supports Android apps in Waydroid. You don't have to "kill" Android as a runtime or smartphone OS; just force Google to compete with 3rd party ROMs.
How exactly are you going to force Google to do something?
What is the US going to do, apply more tariffs?
I don't see a real future for Andrioid as an open platform unless the community comes together and does a hard fork. Google can continue to develop their version and go the Apple way (which, funny enough, no one has a problem with). Development of AOSP can be controlled by a software foundation, like tons of other successful projects.
We need some pro-consumer regulations on hardware which mandate open platforms. Fat chance of that happening, though, as the likes of both the EU and US want these locked down systems so they put in mandatory backdoors.
The reason GNU and Linux won was because they produced software that was sufficient for the market: servers.
The software is also sufficiently good for a PC for software development.
There's almost sufficient software for PC gaming (up against an absolutely insane monopoly that is Microsoft).
Phones are slightly different and for something more than a dumb phone you need great hardware; great software; and great integration.
Employee computers for companies and general home users or tablets? Still a ways to go.
I don't think wanting features and good UX is unreasonable from consumers.
The people who speak in forums are a minority.
> they actually value ease of use and shiny features over privacy and software freedom.
There's no actual competition so we don't know this on any level.
[1] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...
[2] https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-doc-archi...
It's the same as the situation with Chrome/Chromium. There are a million "de-Googled"/"privacy focused" alternatives to Chrome all using the same engine, and when Google pushed manifest v3 changes to block ad-blockers every single one of them was affected.
You are making an orthogonal point. Yes, Google maintains AOSP. No, that does not mean that AOSP OSes that are not in Google's Android program (calling it that to avoid semantics games) have to adopt this change. If you want to hear it from the experts: https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/116103732687045013
That's just objectively wrong, both Brave and Opera still support manifest v2 and are committed to continue doing so for the foreseeable future. Even Edge apparently still has it, funnily enough.
[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/sdk/+/refs/heads/m...
[2]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/tools/base/+/studi...
And I didn't expect Android-Studio to be open source!
[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/sdk/+/refs/heads/m...
Parent-poster just referenced past/future legislation in general.
The only other options would be convincing users to pay 5 bucks a month for their software, or have some Government fork over the tens of millions required to pay open source developers. And good luck with that.
This is not happening in my lifetime, of course it isn't. But by god does it need to happen.
Every single release is a step backwards.
Android 15 cannot hold a candle to what cynogenmod did on top of android 2.3. And that's objective.
It will cost a lot of money and as long as Google is still doing regular AOSP code drops, what's the point?
At the risk of posting memes to HN: https://imgflip.com/i/akp488
Unfortunately, this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem.
Maybe, but there's no technical reason for this. As I've mentioned before, I can do banking just fine on my Gentoo machine where the entire corpus of software on it, is FOSS and compiled by myself.
Laptops exist.
Edit: Someone also made a good point, one of my CC's I can barely even manage without the app since the website barely works.
"Security."
As if I'm in the government or something. Why can't the people who need military level security get their own platform? Shouldn't they just have that already?
Edit: this will likely exist "uncensored" in other markets but conform to the PRCs standards and practices domestically, similarly to how tiktok operated prior to selling a version specifically taylored to US censorship and propaganda.
You may theoretically find it advantageous to use such a system anyhow. To a first-order approximation, the danger a government poses to you is proportional to its proximity to you. (In the interests of fairness, I will point out, so are the benefits a government may offer to you. In this case it just happens to be the dangers we are discussing.) Using the stack of a government based many thousands of miles/kilometers away from you may solve a problem for you, if you judge they are much less likely to use it against you than your local government.
But China certainly won't put out an "open" anything.
Where you been? They already had Huawei get kickbanned by Google and made their own OS (it's not more open): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS
As far as HarmonyOS i dont see many uptakes outside strict US free requirements as the other OEMs are lazy and also dont want to be locked into a competitor.
SailfishOS looks like its your time to faceplant once more , by not having a proper stratergy on monetizing on the many missteps from the current monopoly.I thonk at this point they need a leadership/biz stratergy overhaul - the tech is nice and polished, user demand is off the charts for an alternative . And they are just .. missing. Not even in th e conversation.
Not Google controlled for sure but also not open.
Government bad. Big government worse.
Maybe it's just my experience.
The US system is dying from lack of competition.
This is what lack of options does to a MF
Say it with me: “Living in a police state is bad no matter who’s running it”.
[1] https://grapheneos.org/donate
[2] https://grapheneos.org/
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.imranr.obtainium.fdroid/
This is sad as there’s been a real resurgence of gaming devices (Ayn Thor/Odin, Retroid pocket devices, Ayaneo, etc) moving to Android from Linux variants (Batocera, Arc, Garlic/OnionOS).
It’s sad but more of an incentive for folks to finally take Linux as a viable alternative, and build on efforts made by Valve with SteamOS.
People mentioning forking Android is hard, how easy do LLMs make this?
Recently, I was thinking that AI might force Apple to open their devices, because if Apple’s competitor allows sideloading, then the creatives and builders most likely to build their own apps will migrate to the platform providing less friction to getting custom apps onto their device. But apparently THIS is the time that Google has chosen to start locking down their devices as well?!
not happy about it, but i don't see a path forward that lets one participate in the wider ecosystem and maintain their own sovereignty and sanity.
In contrast, Apple has a ~48 hour turnaround for reviews before you can upload to TestFlight and distribute a beta with a link
Not sure if I am in some "trusted developer" cohort on iOS but not Android - but the difference was enough for me to stop trying on Android
Sure parts of it were, but Google has always remained in control of Android. Anyone who expected that to change (in favor of more openness) hasn't been paying attention to the actions of tech companies for the past several decades.
Remember how hard Amazon had it to attempt an Android fork?
I was due to OEM SOC access being locked out due to those contracts....
Any open source mobile OS attempting to complete with AOSP needs access to mobile OEM soc providers not touched by AOSP contracts and currently that is somewhat hard.
Let's focus on making it possible to use really open Linux systems on smartphones.
Regarding some concrete examples - Google can deeply integrate Gemini, but a competitor can't do this and users get no final say here either. Competitors are restricted by the permission system, Google is not restricted at all.
While rooting can alleviate this to some extent, Play Integrity is there to make sure the user regrets that decision to break free..
A bit ironic to not believe Google is doing this. The same questions have same answers when asked about when Google is locking down side loading. A bit self-serving to pick and choose which things you want to believe are happening.
Nothing lasts for ever. The sooner you make the switch, the better off you will be.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/windows-11-has-hit-1...
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
With W11, that is not the case. Therefore, it becomes inevitable. Worth mentioning is that companies, governments and whole countries are ditching Microsoft altogether - for various reasons(some are geopolitical, due to sanctions and tariffs, others are technical).
Lenovo, Dell and HP are slowly ditching W11 as well in favour of linux. If you look up definitions of malware and spyware, windows 11 falls into both of them. It's that bad. So again, I'm not a linux fanboy by any stretch of imagination, but the writing is not just on the wall, we've passed the point of no return. Or rather, Microsoft has.
Now that linux supports 95% of games, there is little holding people back as gaming was always the biggest hurdle when it came to linux. And Adobe, too, is no longer what keeps people stuck on Windows - either because they ditched it due to their horrible pricing practices, or because there are now solid alternatives.
Of course many people will switch to mac as well. But windows in general, i think, is done. It had a good run for few decades, but they dropped the ball so hard that there is no going back or fixing it with w12.
Point is, we techies might chafe at and complain about all these anti-consumer shenanigans (Meta and privacy, anyone?) but it does not affect their business momentum, probably because the rest of the world just doesn't care.
Personally, I am still on W10 and and delaying the move, so i'm not holier than thou. It's tough. But I also am a programmer/power user and am on my PC 24/7, sort of, so this disruption must be timed properly for me to make the move, which is not necessarily the case for most people/average users.
Phone on the other hand, as long as it works and does not limit me, I have no need to use different ROM, it's more of a want. But i do not see me doing anything until the system stops being supported or it breaks or something else. So it depends on how you use it.
Do you ever feel like the same food item doesn't taste the same it did 10 years ago? Maybe it's your memory being faulty or maybe the company got new management which decided to cut costs while keeping prices, extract the differential value from customer inertia and move on when the product stops being profitable.
Android is the same. Certain freedoms were a part of the offering - a part of the brand name. They no longer are. Not only should lose their trademark[0], they should be legally forced to change the name.
[0]: The purpose of which is to identify genuine product from counterfeits - in this case, the counterfeit just happens to be by the same company which released the original product.
You must find truth. Lies will find you.
I own a Pixel and while the hardware seems decent, I've had a buggy and annoying experience with Android, and it's been getting worse lately.
Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good. That's like Microsoft thinking people use Teams because of its merits.
People buy Android phones because they can be had cheaper than an equivalent iPhone and because in spite of the buggy and inconsistent mess of an OS, you aren't beholden to Apple's regimented UX. Locking down Android will not give it a "premium experience"... It'll always just be "Temu iOS" at best.
GrapheneOS is great!
Come on, that's absolutely laughable.
There are several topics where Android is significantly ahead to the point that iOS is just a toy, and there are areas where the reverse is true.
And I say that as a recent convert, so it's not like I have a decade out of date view of any of the OSs. In my experience I had more visual bugs in case of iOS than android (volume slider not displaying correctly in certain cases when the content was rotated as a very annoying example).
It's not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices.
It's going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of "phone calls only mode" and forced us to rely on their half-baked "priority mode" that's an opaque shitshow.
When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
Pixel Fold disagrees.
> When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
You can do that with do not disturb.
> Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
That is your opinion. My opinion is different.
Android is good, but Googled Android is not. You should check out GrapheneOS to see what Android done properly looks like.
I do think they should offer more pre-configured notification modes by default, if only to show people what they can do with the feature. Perhaps "phone calls only" should be one of those.
And yes, I can also click one button and go into phone calls only mode. I can even set it on a schedule or based on my calendar. I don't know where you're getting your half-baked Android, mine Just Works.
You might not agree with every one of those points, but you can't seriously think everyone thinks like you. Go outside your bubble some time.
Honestly having gone back and forth between iOS and Android every three years or so, both OS are the same. It's not like the grass is really greener on the Apple side. The UX is virtually identical for anything that matters. Personally I put material Android above liquid glass iOS. The alleged polish of the Apple UX was lost on me when I had my last iphone.
The reason Google's moves are surprising has more to do with them embracing being a service player more and more with the arrival of Gemini and them having regulators breathing down their necks everywhere.
I guess they did it after the truly baffling US decision in the Epic trial but it's very likely to go against them in the EU.
This view NEEDS to be central to the tech freedom rhetoric, else the whole movement is literally just begging politicians and hoping corporations do the right thing... useless.
(these are honest questions and not "gotcha")
Well that would be true under a capitalist government.
> Why would state control lead to less policing?
Its not just "the state runs it", its "we actively become the state".
Collective ownership through peoples councils, peoples courts with a world view that keeps it all open: socialism.
The world view of not allowing individual ownership over collective goods, the world view of socialism, is the life line of the movement. The actual practice of daily democracy, of running production and of deciding social functions is everyones responsibility and it should not be left to what has become a professional class of liars.
Public office members, which should only exist where absolutely necessary, should be locals and serve as messengers with 0 decision making power. All power should be in the local councils. We can mathematically implement this today (0 knowledge proofs).
Every single book on socialism is on theory and practices of acheiving this. Thats what the "dictatorship of the proletariat is", the dictatorship of working people, collectively.
> What incentive structure would lead to innovation without a profit motive, when even the modern communist world relies on capital markets?
We've been innovating for hundreds of thousands of years before capitalism. You dont need to generate money to innovate, the innovation itself is the driver, AKA a better life. No need to lock and limit production behind the attaining of profits of those who lead it.
If we force it upon them by begging politicians, corporations still have the incentive to find a way to remove it or circumvent it.
Youre playing the cat and mouse game because you've been taught that solving it is too extreme (thats not a coincidence).
We dont need to endlessly fight a whole class of people, capitalists, for them not to use the things we require against us. Only socialism can solve that.
I regret giving my real name and e-mail address to that website now.
It's time to say goodbye.
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices
Fairphone 4 looks close, hopefully fairphone 4 support will continue to improve at this rate. Pinephone is another close one, but underpowered hardware and camera support kills it.
I am not even that intensive of a phone user. but there is no way I could daily drive pmOS.