Google will allow users to sideload Android apps without verification

I can easily believe that Google's YouTube team would love to kill off such apps, if they can make a significant (say ≥1%) impact on revenue. (After all, being able to make money from views is an actual part of the YouTube product features that they promise to “creators”, which would be undermined if they made it too easy to circumvent.)

But having seen how things work at large companies including Google, I find it less likely for Google's Android team to be allocating resources or making major policy decisions by considering the YouTube team. :-) (Of course if Android happened to make a change that negatively affected YouTube revenue, things may get escalated and the change may get rolled back as in the infamous Chrome-vs-Ads case, but those situations are very rare.) Taking their explanation at face value (their anti-malware team couldn't keep up: bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly. It becomes an endless game of whack-a-mole. Verification changes the math by forcing them to use a real identity) seems justified in this case.

My point though was that whatever the ultimate stable equilibrium becomes, it will be one in which the set of apps that the average person can easily install is limited in some way — I think Google's proposed solution here (hobbyists can make apps having not many users, and “experienced users” can opt out of the security measures) is actually a “least bad” compromise, but still not a happy outcome for those who would like a world where anyone can write apps that anyone can install.

You’re still proving the point above, which is ignoring the fact that the restriction is specifically targeted at a small number of countries. Google is also rolling out processes for advanced users to install apps. It’s all in the linked post (which apparently isn’t being read by the people injecting their own assumptions)

Google is not rolling this out to protect against YouTube ReVanced but only in a small number of countries. That’s an illogical conclusion to draw from the facts.

You would still be able to adb installs them. They wouldn't die.

Consider whether your natural right argument might not stand in several other countries’ legal systems.

The era of United States companies using common sense United States principles for the whole world is coming to an end.

Yeah then you have the choice to not buy the locked down hardware, you don't have a right to get open hardware FROM Google.

Of course there are no good options for open hardware, but that is a related but separate problem.

> Natural right, full stop.

You’re still missing the point the comment is making: In countries where governments are dead set on holding Google accountable for what users do on their phones, it doesn’t matter what you believe to be your natural right. The governments of these countries have made declarations about who is accountable and Google has no intention of leaving the door open for that accountability.

You can do whatever you want with the hardware you buy, but don’t confuse that with forcing another company to give you all of the tools to do anything you want easily.

Yes. The same goes with payment processing. I hate visa/mastercard as much as the next person. But if the court says they're accountable for people who buy drug/firearm/child porn, then it seems to be a quite reasonable reaction for them to preemptively limit what the users can buy or sell.

The government(s) have to treat the middlemen as middlemen. Otherwise they are forced to act as gatekeepers.

These two things are not the same. The GDPR afforded rights to common people. Those companies that would pull out are the ones that were abusing data that was never theirs and could no longer do so.

No, then the results of many google web searches would not put scam sites at the top over the official sites. Google is fine with people being scammed. As long as they get their cut. Large corporations don't have empathy.

From what I've seen, millions lost to scams are with social engineering; through cold calls masquerading as the authorities, phishing, pig butchering; plenty of scam apps on the Play store harvesting data as well, but not a single real life instance of malware installed outside the officially sanctioned platform.

So.. all this drama over an alert(yes/no) box?

Wow, this really pulls back the veil. This Vendor (google) is only looking out for numero uno.

Oh! I thought I had found the crucial piece finally after ~500 words, but there's indeed better news in the section after that! Thanks, I can go sleep with a more optimistic feeling now :)

Also this will kill any impetus that was growing on the Linux phone development side, for better or worse. We get to live in this ecosystem a while longer, let's see if people keep damocles' sword in mind and we might see more efforts towards cross-platform builds for example

it's probably just gonna be under the Developer Options "secret" menu

Let me guess, a warning box that requires me to give permission to the app to install from third-party sources? Is that not clear enough confirmation that I know what I'm doing? /s

Making money and complying with the law. They are obligated to do both. In many countries laws are still enforced.

Protecting their app store revenues from competition exposes them to scrutiny from competition regulators and might be counter productive.

Many governments are moving towards requiring tech companies to enforce verification of users and limit access to some types of software and services or impose conditions requiring software to limit certain features such as end to end encryption. Some prominent people in big tech believe very strongly in a surveillance state and we are seeing a lot of buy in across the political spectrum, possibly due to industry lobbying efforts. Allowing people to install unapproved software limits the effectiveness of surveillance technologies and the revenues of those selling them. If legal compliance risks are pushing this then it is a job for voters, not Google to fix.

Hey, sometimes the dumbest people it works on are also the ones with the decision making ability. What a world to live in.

They absolutely eo completely ignore many security and privacy things because they're very selective in what they focus on, particularly around how those things might impact their ad revenue.

How much they spend is no indicator of how and where they spend it, so is hardly a compelling argument.

I'm not the OP but we know that SMS is not secure. Google should try banning that first.

Isn't Apple technically complying with this even while forcing notarization? Seems like Google could get away with the same scheme.

This is misleading though. There is simply no other choice if you want to use mainstream apps. It could be argued (successfully in my view) that any agreement is null and void due to its acceptance under duress.

Users have an inherent legal right to unconditionally access the full advertised functionality of devices they purchase. Any agreement after that is inherently suspect and I wouldn't be surprised to find out it was ruled unconscionable by some court if it came to that.

We need a free-as-in-freedom version of Android.