Every moat, every walled garden, every infrastructure piece can be rebuilt with AI.
We're seeing it with desktop apps, with games. It will happen to infrastructure and platforms. I'm itching at the opportunity to build open cloud primitives and P2P social protocols.
We don't need big tech anymore. We just need to be able to run our models.
I want to see every *aaS’s functionality required to be offered -on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms- as an API
Who is Ford to tell me I can’t have a widget for each of my ford EVs visible at the same time? Or even that the single-car widget thry do allow has has to be four times bigger than I want it to be, and waste screen real estate on dead space and things that I don’t want?
I typically tell them I don't have an Apple or Google play store. That typically confuses them enough that I can avoid explaining more than just telling them that that is indeed possible.
Although many people do say that there's an issue with banking apps on GrapheneOS, I don't believe that's actually the case. Many banking apps work just fine. In cases where other apps refuse to run, GrapheneOS has compatibility toggles. After toggling those on, many banking apps that complain start working again.
In other cases, banks add Play Integrity checks to their apps, which is a more complex subject. In short, many banking apps check for the basic integrity verdict, which GrapheneOS can get. In other cases, the checks are not implemented properly, and GrapheneOS has a toggle which often gets those apps to work. Finally, a very small number of banking apps require the strong integrity verdict and the apps will refuse to run on GrapheneOS.
Although there are no statistics about this, it does seem that a majority of banking apps work or can be made to work with different compatibility toggles.
It's not a banking app, but there are definitely apps that don't work on GrapheneOS that can't be made to work. A friend of mine is "required" to use Microsoft Authenticator for his work MFA, which won't run. He's looking at having to carry another phone.
Not at all. The app that is enforcing the change is a privileged Google app. Even if someone tried installing it on GrapheneOS, it wouldn't be able to do anything like remove apps, block installation, or disable apps.
And my experience has been that it's frequently harder to sidestep Google's bullshit on GrapheneOS because you don't have as much control of your phone, in the interest of security.
Honestly at this point, I'm just gonna start transitioning to Ubuntu Touch. The Android experiment has run its course.
What you're saying doesn't make any sense. I literally just said that GrapheneOS isn't affected.
The narrative that GrapheneOS is so focused on security that it affects usability, especially given the context, is nonsense. The change that's being discussed here doesn't affect GrapheneOS or other non-GMS operating systems. The only affected OSes are the ones that install Google apps with privileged permissions.
If you want to switch to something else, go ahead. GrapheneOS is still a better overall choice.
That is not the case. It is significantly easier to the point it is entirely optional. GrapheneOSs privacy and security features do not make avoiding google more difficult.
On stock OSs, google signs major portions of the OS and is highly privileged, which is impossible to sidestep.
I understand why you didn't mention it, but there is an opt-out: you enable developer mode and wait 24 hours.
As it runs through Google Play Services, it's pretty likely they'll boil the frog and make it even harder in the future. Moving to an open platform is a good idea.
IIRC it is a cooldown to prevent less tech-savvy individuals from being tricked into installing malicious apps.
I don't think Google is doing this out of some egotistical obsession over "control," it's more that developers and FOSS enthusiasts are a vanishingly small fraction of their customer base.
There are plenty of problems with walled gardens, but IMO this isn't one of them.
> It's more that developers and FOSS enthusiasts are a vanishingly small fraction of their customer base.
Maybe it's because direct installs are too hard to do already? Fortnite tried to go to that route and failed, if Fortnite couldn't make it who can?
And let's be real, I'm not going to accept any talk of "security" from Google when I type "chatgpt" in the search bar of the play store and I have an app with a counterfeit logo coming up at the top spot.
As I understand they're being pressured into it by governments like the Brazilian government to prevent a widespread form of scam there, but of course they're happy to comply because it means they have more control as well
We'd all be safest in a cage but no one wants to live like that
I doubt they care about the Brazilian government. They're not going to lose customers there, the only alternative is iPhones and those are completely unaffordable in Brazil due to their local manufacturing laws. Only the rich few can afford one. They cost about twice as much as anywhere else and this is in a country where people have much less money.
So sanctioning Google means taking the smartphone away from 95% of their population. Which isn't going to happen.
The worst problem with walled gardens is when everything is walled. Android is not supposed to be an "ecosystem", it is a damn OS on compatible hardware.
> I don't think Google is doing this out of some egotistical obsession over "control," it's more that developers and FOSS enthusiasts are a vanishingly small fraction of their customer base.
It's also that that fraction is one they don't get any income from. We don't use Google accounts, Google apps or services etc.
So they don't get to track us as much except the few things you can't turn off in play services. Not everyone can work with custom rom (on those the new restriction obviously doesn't apply at all)
This keeps getting missed out every time it's reported. I can't figure out whether people genuinely don't know, or they're trying to push a narrative that this is worse than it is
Firstly, TFA has a bright red banner describing the opt-out mechanism. It's probably the second most attention-grabbing element on the page, after the countdown. Secondly, initially Google didn't mention any plans for an opt-out at all[1]. That was was only ceded after pushback[2].
I seem to recall some apps refusing to run if developer mode is enabled. A workaround that means I can no longer use the apps I use every day isn't much of a workaround.
Or, we're going to have to start choosing banks without apps or with apps that don't have such ridiculous restrictions. Fortunately, at least in the USA there is an abundance of banks and credit unions, so if one of them treats you like this, just move your account over to a different one. I've changed my primary bank in a single day--It's not hard.
It's not just choosing a bank without an app, existing banks have been neglecting their web sites so that some things are only possible with the app even if an alternative exists. I've had that with my bank, and when I called them to report the problem with their web site their "fix" was that yeah, the web site is kinda broken, just use the app instead and it'll work.
I've considered this before, but the short software support timeframe given by device manufacturers makes this a costly endeavour. I still have a perfectly functional Galaxy Tab S2 9.7, but even the third party ROMs have dropped it. I have a pixel 4a, and although it works beautifully running a supported version of lineage it's very likely that the modem baseband has a significant vulnerability that Google isn't patching. I don't think running banking or crypto wallet software on those devices is any smarter than running it on my daily driver pixel 8.
Is it Developer mode those apps trip on or USB debugging? I've seen several examples of the latter but haven't come across the former yet. I run Google-free Android (14, 15, 16) devices which run the Swedish and Dutch banking and e-ID apps I use on, some of these only work when USB debugging is disabled while others don't care. Some of them complain about Google Play Services not being available but they run nevertheless, that warning is produced by some part of the SDK which gets imported at build time but it does not (yet...) disable anything.
Although USB debugging (ADB) is arguably the main concern, a lot of apps just lazily check for developer mode - meaning they won't boot even if the menu is enabled. It allows stuff like location faking I suppose?
As of Android 17, "Developer Mode" consists of an extra options panel that is enabled through a sort of "Easter egg" process. It's not really even a mode. It's simply a bundle of options that are somewhat dangerous or confusing to twiddle. Users don't need to enter this mode for any practical reason, but entering this "mode" doesn't do anything except exposing more options behind one big toggle.
It doesn't affect the phone's security in any way, unless you specifically tweak a security-related option in that panel. It doesn't degrade the device encryption or Google Play Services. I don't see how any app could balk while it's enabled. There are no apps I have that even run differently. I use the same banking apps and all the other things as normal, whether or not this mode is enabled for me.
Once enabled, it stays enabled even after developer mode is turned back off. It's also associated to the Google account (if any) so later device purchase don't have to wait the 24 hours period
As I understand it, you yourself will also need a google account to unlock the setting to "sideload" in the hidden "developer options" before waiting 24 hours.
What I am not sure is what will happen if I then remove the "google account" which I don't want in my device.
Obviously this does not affect “every device worldwide”. I don’t have a single Android phone, and the devices I own that do run Android are not affected.
there plenty of android devices without google apps, I was running many of them in last 10 years, my current phone is after long time still with enabled gapps, though no google account, I have zero problem to stop using gapps
Removing freedom, and control will never get rid of scammers. Nor will it get rid of the plethora of poorly written corporate owned apps that will still be allowed to fester. It won't even get rid of the apps that scammers use to scam.
At best it gets rid of some scams, certainly not most of them or poorly written apps, which continue to flood the Google PlayStore.
Despite Google's best efforts to automatically ban malicious developers, catching many legitimate developers in the crossfire, their store isn't exactly a bastion of quality or scam-free.
> Despite Google's best efforts to automatically ban malicious developers, catching many legitimate developers in the crossfire, their store isn't exactly a bastion of quality or scam-free.
I honestly doubt their "best efforts".
Fact of life is they make money off apps including malicious ones. For the same reason a lot of promoted content on Google search is clickbait and they even serve malicious apps. Money corrupts.
and installing AI-monitored CCTV that calls the cops when it thinks you're up to no good in every room of every dwelling would reduce the number of murders and rapes by at least half.
I'm sure you will not object when that happens. you are not a murderer or rapist, are you?
I wouldn't, as long as humans aren't viewing it, think of the murders/abuse prevented, it could even monitor your behaviour and be like a pre-cog so if it thinks you sound weird or creepy it sends a robot round to question/arrest you.
24/7 omnipresent behavioral monitoring by an uncompromising algorithm, its hand always hovering over the button that ruins my life? Hell yeah sign me up!
I hope this isn't satire, because it's hilarious how often when someone logically extends the arguments of the authoritarian corporate tech overlords until they turn into a direct retelling of dystopian nightmares from the past, someone pops up and goes "Yes that is my dream world, I would like that please"
I just don't like crime, abuse, murders etc. Giving up a little privacy to stop thousands of murders of innocents is a trade-off im willing to make. What is wrong with people who argue 'No let those kids die, I want to be able to pirate movies'
Not quite. When the update is pushed, there will be an initial 24 hour waiting period to unlock your device. And then you can install unsigned APKs from hobbyist devs or Fdroid as before
> Surrendering your government-issued identification
I don't understand your use of surrendering here. In normal usage, that means handing over your identification to authorities so that you are no longer in possession of the physical ID. Typically, one hears this being done to people that have been arrested as condition of their release on bail so they cannot flee the country.
Google is not asking you to give them your physical identification for them to hold while you are being a developer. They are asking for a copy of your ID as so many other companies do. You have to provide an ID to check into a hotel, not surrender your ID. You have to provide an ID to interact with a bank (for those that still do that in person), and again they give it back. Apps like Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc also ask for images of IDs as well.
Why you would choose to say surrender like this just shows how you're willing to use words to make things sound worse in order to persuade people to your point. However, you have now ceded the high road and just become another one of those mountain out of mole hills types. Was your argument so weak that you have to go to this level of twisting the narrative?
So they're a piece of shit because you've decided that surrendering necessarily means losing physical possession
I agree with the wording, having to give your ID to Google when we'd all much rather that they don't have it is a surrender, it's dubious consent (read: not consent) it's precisely as vile and forceful as the word surrender implies it is
you're drawing a line between "showing" vs "surrendering" by physical possession. Well, there's a big difference between showing an ID at a bank and providing a copy to Google which they keep forever.
Not to mention, one of the most important things, the absolute best app out there for controlling insulin pumps for diabetics is an open source app you have to "sideload." I'm not usually one to make hyperbolic accusations, but in this case Google attempting to kill sideloading could put real people's lives in danger, or substantially damage their quality of life.
Hotels have a reasonable need to know that I am the person who paid for the service, so I can get what I paid for. The hotel also does not remember, a human glances at your ID to compare your name and that's that.
Google has no need to know who anyone is here. I want to provide an app, someone else wants to use my app, all entirely off Google's sacred platforms. We should be able to work together, but in comes a middleman who demands to see our IDs because he owns the platform and can just do that. That ID, of course, is digitally stored and will be retained indefinitely.
IMHO, this is a great time to push PWAs even harder. I know they're not a fit for every use case, but most of the apps I saw and/or use would work just fine as PWAs. If Mozilla wants to do the right thing this time, they could reconsider bringing first-class PWA support back across all platforms.
I am being completely honest here - what is the reason that the government id thing is a problem here? And why is attesting the private key (evidence that you have it) an issue?
I get the rest but I can’t get my head around people who find these two things upsetting.
Because the Company have no support and it is all AI and Bots… their verifications don't work..
I have a company with both App Store and Play Store apps out, but when I wanted to use my Personal account to distribute a free app, it took with Apple 1 hour with registration and then one phone call to their EU Developer support to get approved.
4 months later and I am nowhere with Googles new system and have given up..
My app is now iOS and APK only, which mean no none nerd users on Android.
Google play store was ruled a monopoly and the Apple App store was not. Google allows alternatives on their platform and Apple strictly forbids it.
If the legal system dictates that open = monopoly and closed = fair game, then you get dumb shit like this.
Probably one of the dumbest rulings in tech ever, but few people know about it. Basically set precedent to never share your platform if you don't want legal scrutiny.
Your app ecosystem might decrease as developers who don't want to register lose interest and the number of users supporting open source projects decreases.
In short, it doesn't affect you. Even if you tried installing the app that enforces the changes on GrapheneOS, it wouldn't have the necessary privileges to do anything.
I thought Google was adding more hoops to jump through for F-Droid, Termux and the like. Did that change? Obviously the more hoops the less happy we will be, but it'd be nice to know.
I'd just turn off my phone before midnight, boot it into fastboot and reflash lineage 2 days later, missing the window for them to push anything. No gapps btw.
The 24 hour waiting period is absolutely ridiculous. The article says to download alternative stores but I thought they too are impacted as it is the installation mechanic.
The waiting period is the best way to combat coercion. If I’m setting up a new phone, the setup already takes multiple hours that adding 24 hours doesn’t really mean much. It does a wonderful job of making sure you actually really want this app.
What about when you're not setting up a new phone? A waiting period doesn't combat coercion. Look at the people who have been kidnapped and held for days because the ATM has daily withdrawal limits.
> The EFF calls app gatekeeping "an ever-expanding pathway to internet censorship."
I think what's interesting, and what our grandchildren will look back on, was how naive the early internet was. There was almost this sense of "the government is powerless" whether it be piracy or jailbreaking or casual death threats [8647 style] or who knows what else. Combined with also a sense that devices will always be exploitable, there's always a way around, resistance from government and corporations will always be futile.
This is not the problem it is presented to be, and I see more benefits to this than prejudice.
There is a very concerning amount of illegal apps/scams distributed through ads that I've casual users install somewhat banally with the aid of short walkthroughs.
Any sufficiently advanced user is barely affected by this, as the procedure is just complex enough to block average people from getting scammed/using illegal services unknowingly, but simple enough to barely be an inconvenience for anyone who cares enough and can go through it.
"This is barely an inconvenience, it's just a 9-step, 24h-long step through a proprietary service, and mandatory sign-up with governmental ID for the developers, everyone technical enough can easily bypass it"
I believe this is usually referred to as "boiling the frog".
This sort of breathless outrage rhetoric would be a lot easier to take seriously if it spent even a minute acknowledging the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate: tech support scams where people are walked through installing an app that takes over their phone and steals their money, private data, and identity.
You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
Tech is cool, but it's not an end in itself. Serving people should be. And if people are getting hurt, it's not working well, even if those people are not the ones that read Hacker News.
It's like locking people out of their own home, and then when people express outrage the concern troll steps in from out of frame to point out that they're not acknowledging the very real risk that if they could access their own house gasp they might accidentally let the wrong person in, or break something, or whatever.
Many scams are committed thru apps like AnyDesk, TeamViewer, RustDesk...
That are apps already in the store. That is a very cheap, easy, proven way of doing it.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a propaganda technique that tech companies have used for long against open source and competitors. The propaganda is to pretend that a 24 hour cooldown and making it difficult to install externals apps is for the good of the user meanwhile stealing their data and giving it to anybody that pays for it.
People are getting hurt. Mass spying should stop now.
Or even Whatsapp, which people already have installed on their phone. No need to go to the store to install anything.
A scammer managed to convince a relative to share their screen during a Whatsapp video call. Luckly, said relative didn't use banking apps on the phone, the bank rejected as suspicious the transaction on the computer which would have sent money to the scammer, and the relative asked me for help before going to the ATM to unblock the account (I then contacted the bank and had them fully block the account as a precaution, and told my relative to go to the bank branch the next day to change the passwords and unblock the account).
2) don't put it on a timer. What's most damning, in my opinion, is that this is the very definition of a bait-and-switch. Any rational person thinks this won't apply to their existing phone because it came before the rollout, right? They're wrong. That's just an accident then?
Phone carriers can't be bothered to police their networks to mitigate flagrant bad actors, who can't be shut down by state law enforcement, so your software company needs to take control of your device away from you. "For your own safety."
It's just a confession that none of these organizations - not the carriers, not the government, and not Evil Google, who are all confessing public that they are unfit for the responsibilities they've claimed.
Huh? You’re arguing for carriers to inspect all traffic to block scammers? That’s way more intrusive than google blocking sideloading. The outrage on places like HN would be deafening.
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
The propaganda I'm seeing is coming from Google. I can't tell you how many times lately I've seen ads on TV/streaming pushing the security narrative for Play Store. Google knows what it is doing is blatantly anti-consumer and they very much want public sentiment to think it's not.
There will always be means to scam individuals through technology. Pulling stunts like this is not justified simply because it closes off one means of doing so.
Google, who gladly take the money from criminals in exchange for funneling victims to their scam websites have the moral high ground and are unfortunately forced to take away the user's freedoms?
Look at the incentives. Google makes money from scam ads. Most ads I see online are scams of some sort. If Google completely blocked scams, they might not be in business.
Yes I understand that Google says they care a lot about scams and that there are people there working on blocking scams. But those are words. We need to look at money.
There is a very simple way that Google can block basically all scam ads: review all ads manually before approval, and allow no dynamic changes. They won’t do this, because it would implode their business model.
Look at the incentives. Google makes money from ads. Bad ads cause users to distrust Google ads, causing those users to be less valuable, causing advertisers to spend less with Google.
The goal is maintaining a continuous stream of revenue, not killing the stream for short term gains.
Advertisers don’t care about what other ads are doing, why would they?
Google not only benefits from scam ads, they innovated the entire scam ad economy. Prior to the proliferation of automated online ad services, ads on TV, print media et al were carefully reviewed. There were very little scams.
Naturally such a business has a scaling cap. Online websites would collaborate with advertisers directly, and there were little to no scams. Then Google and others entered the picture and innovated automatic ads with virtually no human verification. After that, we saw an entire online scam ad economy explode.
It’s not just that Google doesn’t care enough about scam ads. They created scam ads, it’s their bread and butter. Not just Google either, we see the same thing with meta on their platforms. The scams will not go away.
Very much seems to me like they realized probably a decade ago they anyone smart enough to distrust ads uses a blocker and that the vast overwhelming majority of people are just completely unaware of any risk an ad could pose.
It genuinely seems like the "ad integrity" department is a fig leaf to keep regulators away from the billion dollar scam ad business, and the people in said department believing otherwise doesn't convince me in the slightest. Soldiers in Afghanistan really thought they were liberators, but that doesn't mean that's actually why they were there
I don't think you can just do anything you want in the name of security and protecting users. This will make installing apps needlesly difficult. There is already a warning when enabling installation of apps from unknown sources. That should be enough. If users don't read that's on them.
The real problem here is not that Google is doing this bad thing. The real problem is that they can do this bad thing. They shouldn't have this power. Something needs to be done to rain in Google and take back Android as an open platform.
Users don’t read warnings. Most scams capitalise on urgency. When given more time to stop and think something through, it often becomes obvious what’s happening.
Courts make you liable for results, not intentions, like the way Quad9 is now an illegal piracy operation in France because it doesn't block pirate sites.
If you had a big corpo being affected by every knife murder, you'd be sure that they would be liable. Since murders usually "only" affect an individual nothing is being done
First, courts do hold manufacturers responsible for manufacturing or design defects.
Then, generally, "software is just a tool like a knife" doesn't hold because software today is more a service than a tangible good. Companies continue to update the programs and things can happen in the cloud with limited user control.
To be fair, this likely only affects millions (if that many) devices -- most people don't sideload apps, and of those that do, most of those users are more than capable of reenabling it through developer tools. The vast majority of Android users don't want to sideload (and shouldn't sideload since they don't know how to validate the safety of the app and they'll sideload anything a website tells them to)
Nobody reads warnings or errors. StackOverflow is full of questions where someone pastes a clear error message and asks what they have to do when the very error message tells them the solution.
Also, scammers just tell people to ignore warnings and they do it. If someone is able to convince you that your child is in danger and that you have to bypass all warnings to help them, you _will_ do it.
Should Google be less than an asshole in all things? Yes.
I think there’s this like “something must be done now!” attitude of self-important, busybodies I can’t get behind… even if they’re right.
Why have people convinced themselves into thinking now is the most important thing in the world? That if it doesn’t happen now so that it makes me happy instantly it isn’t an option?
Evolution; social, tech, biological, legal, just fucking takes time, and that’s a feature.
There will be a period in which there’s a ton of food over there but your little fishy fins can’t get to it, and that sucks, but deal with it yourself, or just chill and let things happen. I promise if it’s important someone will solve it eventually and the scales do not need to be tipped for every little thing like phone app permissiveness.
In the meantime, you are free to not buy an android phone if you don’t like the system that Google has produced. You seem to think that because you can see its insides that it is collectively owned. It isn’t. Google owns it. Talk of talking it from its owners, is theft. In this case, justified entirely because you don’t like a process they decided on.
Don’t make me defend Google, I fucking hate Google.
I have huge incentives to have a phone. It means Android or Apple. not exactly a flourishing free market of choices. Banks, the government, places I want to go to all either force me to use an app, or create costs in money and time if I want to avoid using one.
> That should be enough. If users don't read that's on them.
The phone scammers who are saying the FBI/NSA/IRS will arrest you unless you install sketchy remote access software or other malware are rather convincing to a certain demographic of people and no amount of text on the screen will stop that. It all comes down to whether or not you view the tradeoff being that vulnerable people are worth protecting with this measure worldwide or not.
You understand then that there is absolutely no possible fix for that right?
If your grandma will follow current instructions, she will follow these new instructions including a 24 hour wait.
Your grandma will follow instructions to walk down to walgreens and buy a brand new device if they tell her. The solution has nothing to do with the device and everything to do with you needing to be an adult and figure out how to get your grandma to not follow directions of scammers.
This isn't a tech problem and you cannot solve it with tech.
This is not true. Scams rely on continuous urgency and want the entire process completed without you ever hanging up the phone, and cooling-off periods routinely break the illusion.
I can think of 2 examples, in my personal life, in the last few years where a simple passing comment in conversation perked the ears of a more experienced person and kept a couple of young people from being scammed. The addition of time was key in both.
There is a very real usability issue that has to analysed when developing high risk products, and that's popup fatigue.
A huge number of people just click accept to any popup they get because they're so fed up with seeing them. It's something that is often analysed in design of medical products
I experienced this problem in semiconductor manufacturing.
It was really difficult to explain to Korea that the additional warnings they wanted me to put in front of the tool operators were actually causing more harm than good. The cultural divide made this really difficult to approach.
"What do you mean the American mfg staff don't actually read everything?!"
"Yeah... Especially at the ATX line. We kind of go off vague shapes around here"
> Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
The best solution would have been to be able to mark ANY alternative app store like fdroid as trusted and no such cooldown period would hit everytime people install an app from there. This avoids using installed apps downloaded from an arbitrary URL but at the same time keeps the alternative app stores as a good alternative. Google decided to play unfair again.
Oh, ok, thanks for the information. But if it is a one-time, device-level wait, not per source and not per app, then I'm unsure how this should prevent scammers in the long term?
I'm pretty convinced it is just Google testing boiling the water steady and slowly :)
Which makes it useless to protect against this type of scam. The script will just change from "I'll exploit my current mark" to "I'll prepare my current mark to be vulnerable and then sell it on".
That is a real concern, but I don’t for a minute believe that it’s Google’s only motivation. This is also securing a revenue stream and making it harder for others to compete.
Full disclosure, I am an iPhone user in part because I personally like living in the walled garden. But I also acknowledge that it has its downsides. I have a separate Android device just for language learning because the open source language learning app ecosystem is basically nonexistent on Apple’s locked-down platform. I’m not thrilled about the possibility of that ecosystem withering snd dying on Android, too.
This sounds like know-it-all propaganda as well. Why not make it opt-in? Google (and other Big Tech companies) seem to think they know better than everyone else, even though they are also completely untransparent about what they do.
After researching this for some time, the majority of scams are perpetrated with apps that are already in the Play Store and are remote access apps. The entire premise that the Play Store is safe and everything else is dangerous is not borne out by the empirical evidence.
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
I would turn this right around and say that until the proponents of this measure acknowledge that the Play Store is not safe and is in fact a primary vector for scams, you're just doing propaganda.
It's exactly the same as the people crying conspiracy about parts-locking for repairability, not acknowledging the real effects it had on phone thefts and the pressure at the national and governmental level to help solve the epidemic.
There is already many warnings and if the can get you to do that they can get you to other types of scams rather don't require installing an app like sharing data, putting info on websites.
When I was still on android, I installed F-Droid to avoid the google app store entirely, since the google app store's vetting is -uh- not very good.
The correct move is to remove the (icon for) the google app store from inexperienced user's phones. (I'm dead serious, and it works)
Unfortunately, that's exactly the move that now gets sabotaged by this google change.
So sure I'll acknowledge the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate. It does in fact marginally mitigate the precise narrow risk they state, but introduces a fatal flaw in its place. Probably unwise to let naive users use android at all anymore after this.
Sorry, I get where your emotions are coming from with this, but it is just technically wrong on every level.
The vast majority of tech support scams come through apps on the Play Store. Not only that, but malicious apps get approved on the Play Store constantly.
There is no reason to take any claim that this change is meant to mitigate scams seriously, because there's no evidence to support that it makes a noticeable dent in such activity.
What this change does noticeably and impactfully do, is prevent, via chilling effects, users from being able to use their phones in ways that could lose Google and its partner vendors post-sales revenue.
As you said, serving people should be the end in itself, and this change doesn't do that - it hurts people.
I'm somebody who likes lifting weights. I often lift weights heavy enough that, if done improperly, could harm me greatly and grossly.
There are people at my gym who often have very bad form who I worry about. I will occasionally chat them up so they're not, for example, shoulder pressing with their arms outside of the scapular plane or benching without any arch in their back. Sometimes they appreciate it and ask me more questions. Sometimes they give me a terse 'thanks' and go back to doing it the way they want to do it.
If somehow every gym started forbidding people from using any equipment with which they could harm themselves unless they could prove, with a 24h cooling off period, that they knew the form and dangers in detail, I'm sure it would probably save a few people from suffering temporary injuries. I think it would also drive a lot of people away from any kind of sustained resistance training and be an overall net negative for public health.
Personally, I don't think such a nanny-state implementation is necessary? That you should be able to easily toggle off such a feature if you like and what happens to you happens. Perhaps there should be a 'tech-illiterate' mode toggled on by default but easily toggled off if you know how to access Developer Options with a little more forewarning about common scams. Perhaps gyms (or Google) could pay people to proactively assist and help people they see as the most vulnerable to certain kinds of exploits. Perhaps instead of spending time training Gemini to be a general-assist LLM they could train a very small local model to hyperspecifically guard against known intrusions.
There are so many more pro-social, less-draconian ways of tackling safety issues, from socialization to ongoing support to education efforts. A lockdown that just happens to also help ensure that they can extract their pound of flesh inside the abattoir that is Google Play seems at best overly protective and at worst just more corporate extraction of surplus value from individuals.
If that's really what it is, Google should put their money where their mouth is. I'd be ok with this change if you had to go through all the same hoops to install apps through the Play store.
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
I strongly agree with this statement.
If a piece of public communication is intended to sway the reader's opinion without informing them (or while selectively informing them, which is close to the same thing), it is propaganda.
> I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise
I don't. An hour would make the same point and provide the same level of protection. So would clicking through a few screens with very simple and easy to understand warning messages about the risk of scams. Sure, it's a compromise, but it's pretty much the opposite of excellent.
A scammer would stay on the phone for an hour so they don't talk to anyone else about it. A few screens would be ignored.
24 hours might not be enough, and there is a risk that a scammer gets a user to go into developer mode and then calls back a few days later to try and 'fix the issue' or something. At least in 24 hours the victim might talk to someone about it and then find they're being scammed.
The topic has been discussed multiple times, and propaganda really feels like not acknowledging past discussions. You might not have seen past discussions so I'll give you a pass and restate my argument.
They main way that scams reach end users are through the willing participation of ad platforms, and even before DSA (not that much has changed) people (myself included) have done countless reports of straight up scam ads with no recourse and a templated "we have found nothing wrong with the ad".
As a data point, have you not seen the Tai Chi AI ads on YouTube that will "make you a different person by the end of the week" which where run by a company that sold you a subscription via dark patterns with all the surprises that brings (like a big headache of an unsubscribe process).
Or the fact that Meta knows that X% of it's ads are scam/phising and do nothing about it because it hurts the bottomline (an AI chat will help you with references).
The hypocrisy is too much coming from Google since they are owners of the machine that feed scams right to your doorstep.
And let's not ignore all the other fronts they are fighting on to further lock down the Android platform (such as not making source available immediately and moving more of the runtime in their play services and platform integrity nonsense).
I'm fine with this as long as F-Droid and other stores are treated equally.
If I have to wait 24h to install an app from another store, I demand the same to apply to AppStore. I see app stores just like browsers: users must have the ability to choose which browser they want when installing an operating system, and for Android, users must be able to select which app store they want and they should work the same way.
> the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate:
The risk of people cutting themselves is not a responsibility nor a concern for the knife manufacturers. I would be very upset if one day all kitchen knives would be sold blunt just to mitigate some clueless people from cutting their fingers off.
Similarly, I seriously and absolutely don't get it why people falling for scams should be a reason to require KYC to distribute apps.
Especially given that KYC-passed accounts are easily obtainable online for pennies.
Uh it absolutely is a concern and a responsibility . Different knives are made the way they are precisely to avoid people cutting themselves accidentally during various kinds of cutting motions. Additionally blunt knives are significantly more dangerous than sharp ones which is why they don't ship blunt ones.
Maybe before trying to go off half assed exactly like this outrage website does, you should take 5 minutes to be bothered to see if what you are saying is even mildly correct
This is nothing but a business decision to extort money from developers and you know it. It's anti-competitive at its core, locking out other, more reliable app stores and taking control of an open source operating system. It's just one more measure in a long trend of fulfilling the wet dreams of large tech, namely killing personal computing and controlling everything people can do with devices they've bought.
So Google is going to tackle scams on youtube too right? Because they care so much about the poor scam victims, and this has nothing to do with establishing overarching control.
I’m all for trying to stop those who are getting harmed from being harmed, but at what point do we acknowledge the ignorance of those people? Installing random apps, provenance truly unknown, to your phone is a bad idea because of the security risk in doing so. I’d have the same advice for someone operating a windows PC. Don’t be downloading and installing random .exe to your environment, you’re gonna have a bad time. The former seems to be this mysterious new idea, unable to comprehend. Most people seem to know the latter and you get flamed for admitting “I installed this random .exe recommended to me by this dude on the phone who said he’s helping me.”
People gotta learn. Sometimes the best teacher is pain and suffering. I wish that weren’t true, but in my time on this planet, there has never been more truth to “you can lead a horse to water, but you certainly can’t make it drink it.”
Trying to save people against their will just doesn’t seem the best path. I’d rather more effort be put into education on best practices, or investment in an app sniffer that can try and identify common attack vectors. Idk, anything other than “some people are too stupid for their own good, so now we all have less freedom.” I mean truly, if you’re worried about grandma’s phone safety, only let her buy an iPhone. No android for mi-ma.
All I see here is Google snatching at the opportunity to get some of that scrumptious walled garden money.
> This sort of breathless outrage rhetoric would be a lot easier to take seriously if it spent even a minute acknowledging the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate: tech support scams where people are walked through installing an app that takes over their phone and steals their money, private data, and identity.
1. Is requiring developers to submit government ID actually an effective way to prevent tech support scams? Will scammers actually be deterred by a government ID requirement in addition to the existing developer registration process?
2. Is requiring developers to submit government ID the best option to prevent tech support scams? Are there other options that Google could use to make Android user less susceptible to tech support scams?
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
The tradeoff, such as it is, is acknowledged on keepandroidopen.org under the "But wait, isn't this...just about security?" section:
> The security rationale is a smokescreen. Google Play Protect already scans for malware independent of developer identity. Requiring a government ID doesn't make code safer.
Finally:
> Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
I don't think this is an excellent compromise. Scammers are persistent. I'm not convinced a 24 hour cooldown is enough to deter them in any meaningful way. I, on the other hand, am not persistent enough to wait 24 hours to install an Android app from F-Droid just to try it out.
>You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
There is a third position beside "I agree/disagree with the tradeoff", which is "I don't consider the tradeoff as stated truthful and refuse to frame the conversation that way".
Every closing of rights comes with a legitimate-sounding reason. Protect the children, etc. Most activist have been through this process enough times to see the play coming a mile away.
It is also surprising to see, on a place called hacker news, people defending closed systems and removal of agency from end users by giant corporations.
> There is a third position beside "I agree/disagree with the tradeoff", which is "I don't consider the tradeoff as stated truthful and refuse to frame the conversation that way".
Thank you. When you see it once, it becomes so obvious everywhere else. Every single time it's just assertions without hard statistics, always perpetrated by the side that also happens to profit from it or accomplishes something else they really want to do. I'm not going to deny that the number of people who get scammed through sideloading isn't zero, but I don't have to accept as unwritten fact that these lockdowns are actually about that, or that this number of people is significant at all compared to everyone who just wants to install off-Google Play apps, like what Google implied and almost everyone here just accepted.
> It is also surprising to see, on a place called hacker news, people defending closed systems and removal of agency from end users by giant corporations.
The shift is shocking. One of my most popular comments, from no more than several months ago, was about this very topic. It was about the way Google will, like all other corporations, slowly ratchet up their 'measures' until there's no way left but their way. I basically retold that comment here, expanding on the process itself, and it's already at the near bottom of the thread. But the shift isn't unexpected. Lots of people here aren't the customizer, tinkerer, off the beaten path kind of 'hacker', but the tech enthusiast kind. Lots have direct links to Silicon Valley and the tech overlords of today. As the tech industry consumes everything else in the world, their rhetoric shifts from "Look at all these things we'll let you do!" to "We own you", so does the average sentiment of the users.
I couldn't agree more with your comment, especially the first paragraph. It feels like there's always someone ready to play the devil's advocate for corporations, so subsequent discussions happen mostly under unrealistic assumptions which happen to align with the companies' goals.
Why do we keep having to sacrifice our freedom for the fake safety of the ignorant and their continued freedom to be ignorant?
Why do we have to be lectured on how important this change is for their safety, while the Play store continues to be the primary location scam apps come from?
When do the companies get to be the ones that have to give up freedoms in favor of everyone else's safety?
Googler propaganda. Huge majority of scams is through play store apps and AdMob ads. Google doesn't care about scams, they care about control and sucking up money.
Filippo, I'm rather surprised and disappointed to see this come from you. I'd much rather see Google working on preventing abuse of apps already installable via the Play Store, instead of imposing restrictions on those who do not want to use their store to begin with.
I don't mind warnings and even brief cool downs but 24 hours is ridiculous.
If I lose or break my phone, I have to wait 24 hours after acquiring my new phone to use the apps I previously used? It's just absurd.
If I had to explain to clients that I was unable to do work until tomorrow, I'd be ridiculed.
These scams regularly go on for days anyway. Now the scammer just gets them to install it and says "we'll call you back tomorrow to finish getting rid of the viruses"
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
I would argue pretending like this is actually for anyone's security is propaganda hiding the fact that this is all for Google to tighten its grip on Android.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of dealing with corporate overreach based on the excuse that so many people are too stupid to operate the device responsibly.
I'm on a 3rd party, no goggle account, AOSP built OS. So I don't think this immediate change in 2027 will affect me.
While AOSP is a current workaround, this whole ability to build a non-goggle android via AOSP is also under threat from goggle lockdown.
That means this trend of having to part with the OS intended for the too stupid population is only going to increase.
So, needing to depart from android completely is in the near term.
Linux pones become ever more usable, including android in a jail.
The phone was never yours. You have a nice, granular set of permissions which (attempt to) control what apps can do ... but you don't really have any permissions that prevent you from _Google_ spying on you and selling your data or giving it up to law enforcement. It's like the propaganda radio you can turn down, but never off. You're given just enough control to feel like you have a choice.
I guess the an alternative open unix based operating system that can upload existing apps from both android as well as apple is needed or the greed will not never end. This is about corporations that constantly need growth using new ways to collect rent from the rest of the world. They are chocking the world to collect new monies.
They are recommending installing F-droid.. and not accepting android's demands. Its time to have open source smart phone operating system that can not be taken hostage.
Regulation by 3rd parties. People use phones for payments and accessing sensitive services. But these apps work only on Android / iOS. There those who don't seek this use case, but there are rather small and increasingly shrinking minority. This is compounded by the knowhow needed to install non-stock OS on phone in the first place.
But I mean what are you saying really? An iPhone absolutely doesn't allow you to just randomly install stuff from the web unless there's been some update that I don't know about.
You can still install unsigned APKs via ADB. Or you can install unsigned APKs following an initial 24 hour wait. Or you can install APKs on non-Play Protect devices
317 comments
[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadThe issue will be your bank, your gov, your uni, and school not releasing a compatible app for you.
And nowadays a device that cannot communicate or be trusted by other actors of the network (internet) is pretty much useless.
I hope those entities will wake up and start serving equivalents functionalities via the open web.
That is why we have the good old WWW for.
We can use AI to take back the entire tech stack.
Every moat, every walled garden, every infrastructure piece can be rebuilt with AI.
We're seeing it with desktop apps, with games. It will happen to infrastructure and platforms. I'm itching at the opportunity to build open cloud primitives and P2P social protocols.
We don't need big tech anymore. We just need to be able to run our models.
Who is Ford to tell me I can’t have a widget for each of my ford EVs visible at the same time? Or even that the single-car widget thry do allow has has to be four times bigger than I want it to be, and waste screen real estate on dead space and things that I don’t want?
Can you imagine of those "de-banking" people actually existed and could read?
In other cases, banks add Play Integrity checks to their apps, which is a more complex subject. In short, many banking apps check for the basic integrity verdict, which GrapheneOS can get. In other cases, the checks are not implemented properly, and GrapheneOS has a toggle which often gets those apps to work. Finally, a very small number of banking apps require the strong integrity verdict and the apps will refuse to run on GrapheneOS.
Although there are no statistics about this, it does seem that a majority of banking apps work or can be made to work with different compatibility toggles.
Honestly at this point, I'm just gonna start transitioning to Ubuntu Touch. The Android experiment has run its course.
The narrative that GrapheneOS is so focused on security that it affects usability, especially given the context, is nonsense. The change that's being discussed here doesn't affect GrapheneOS or other non-GMS operating systems. The only affected OSes are the ones that install Google apps with privileged permissions.
If you want to switch to something else, go ahead. GrapheneOS is still a better overall choice.
On stock OSs, google signs major portions of the OS and is highly privileged, which is impossible to sidestep.
Optional is obviously easier than impossible.
As it runs through Google Play Services, it's pretty likely they'll boil the frog and make it even harder in the future. Moving to an open platform is a good idea.
I don't think Google is doing this out of some egotistical obsession over "control," it's more that developers and FOSS enthusiasts are a vanishingly small fraction of their customer base.
There are plenty of problems with walled gardens, but IMO this isn't one of them.
Maybe it's because direct installs are too hard to do already? Fortnite tried to go to that route and failed, if Fortnite couldn't make it who can?
And let's be real, I'm not going to accept any talk of "security" from Google when I type "chatgpt" in the search bar of the play store and I have an app with a counterfeit logo coming up at the top spot.
We'd all be safest in a cage but no one wants to live like that
So sanctioning Google means taking the smartphone away from 95% of their population. Which isn't going to happen.
Google is doing this because Google wants to.
It's also that that fraction is one they don't get any income from. We don't use Google accounts, Google apps or services etc.
So they don't get to track us as much except the few things you can't turn off in play services. Not everyone can work with custom rom (on those the new restriction obviously doesn't apply at all)
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260312134021/https://developer...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20260328133800/https://developer...
Either way, what Google plans to do is absolutely crazy.
It doesn't affect the phone's security in any way, unless you specifically tweak a security-related option in that panel. It doesn't degrade the device encryption or Google Play Services. I don't see how any app could balk while it's enabled. There are no apps I have that even run differently. I use the same banking apps and all the other things as normal, whether or not this mode is enabled for me.
I’m not sure if you would have to re-enable it every time to sideload updates or new apps. You can also install via adb with no waiting period.
And my work doesn't permit it even with byod, it's so annoying. I've stopped running byod for that reason but now I'm stuck with two phones again.
Besides, I would not comply anyway.
again IANAL but be careful.
What I am not sure is what will happen if I then remove the "google account" which I don't want in my device.
Obviously this does not affect “every device worldwide”. I don’t have a single Android phone, and the devices I own that do run Android are not affected.
Despite Google's best efforts to automatically ban malicious developers, catching many legitimate developers in the crossfire, their store isn't exactly a bastion of quality or scam-free.
I honestly doubt their "best efforts".
Fact of life is they make money off apps including malicious ones. For the same reason a lot of promoted content on Google search is clickbait and they even serve malicious apps. Money corrupts.
I'm sure you will not object when that happens. you are not a murderer or rapist, are you?
I hope this isn't satire, because it's hilarious how often when someone logically extends the arguments of the authoritarian corporate tech overlords until they turn into a direct retelling of dystopian nightmares from the past, someone pops up and goes "Yes that is my dream world, I would like that please"
Thousands of murders are not happening inside private homes. Almost every single murder that happens in my city happens on the street.
Something is in fact wrong with you. You want political dissidents arrested for the fake safety of preventing nonexistent murders.
That's disgusting.
I don't understand your use of surrendering here. In normal usage, that means handing over your identification to authorities so that you are no longer in possession of the physical ID. Typically, one hears this being done to people that have been arrested as condition of their release on bail so they cannot flee the country.
Google is not asking you to give them your physical identification for them to hold while you are being a developer. They are asking for a copy of your ID as so many other companies do. You have to provide an ID to check into a hotel, not surrender your ID. You have to provide an ID to interact with a bank (for those that still do that in person), and again they give it back. Apps like Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc also ask for images of IDs as well.
Why you would choose to say surrender like this just shows how you're willing to use words to make things sound worse in order to persuade people to your point. However, you have now ceded the high road and just become another one of those mountain out of mole hills types. Was your argument so weak that you have to go to this level of twisting the narrative?
I agree with the wording, having to give your ID to Google when we'd all much rather that they don't have it is a surrender, it's dubious consent (read: not consent) it's precisely as vile and forceful as the word surrender implies it is
Perhaps they're using "surrender" in its meaning of "hand over something you didn't want to hand over", "give up under duress"?
Please don't use one loss of privacy to justify more.
Something, something, slippery slope.
Google has no need to know who anyone is here. I want to provide an app, someone else wants to use my app, all entirely off Google's sacred platforms. We should be able to work together, but in comes a middleman who demands to see our IDs because he owns the platform and can just do that. That ID, of course, is digitally stored and will be retained indefinitely.
I get the rest but I can’t get my head around people who find these two things upsetting.
I have a company with both App Store and Play Store apps out, but when I wanted to use my Personal account to distribute a free app, it took with Apple 1 hour with registration and then one phone call to their EU Developer support to get approved. 4 months later and I am nowhere with Googles new system and have given up..
My app is now iOS and APK only, which mean no none nerd users on Android.
If the legal system dictates that open = monopoly and closed = fair game, then you get dumb shit like this.
Probably one of the dumbest rulings in tech ever, but few people know about it. Basically set precedent to never share your platform if you don't want legal scrutiny.
I'd just turn off my phone before midnight, boot it into fastboot and reflash lineage 2 days later, missing the window for them to push anything. No gapps btw.
I have an Android Developer Verifier app (com.google.android.verifier) since sometime in August. Visible only if you go deep in Settings.
edit: since you have no gapps, they couldn't push it to your phone, though.
I think what's interesting, and what our grandchildren will look back on, was how naive the early internet was. There was almost this sense of "the government is powerless" whether it be piracy or jailbreaking or casual death threats [8647 style] or who knows what else. Combined with also a sense that devices will always be exploitable, there's always a way around, resistance from government and corporations will always be futile.
There is a very concerning amount of illegal apps/scams distributed through ads that I've casual users install somewhat banally with the aid of short walkthroughs.
Any sufficiently advanced user is barely affected by this, as the procedure is just complex enough to block average people from getting scammed/using illegal services unknowingly, but simple enough to barely be an inconvenience for anyone who cares enough and can go through it.
24h delay is not all of it, there's developer verification.
I believe this is usually referred to as "boiling the frog".
Any sources for this claim? I don't buy it.
You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
Tech is cool, but it's not an end in itself. Serving people should be. And if people are getting hurt, it's not working well, even if those people are not the ones that read Hacker News.
Also. I regularly remove malware from people's android phones pro bono in and around my community. It all comes from the play store.
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a propaganda technique that tech companies have used for long against open source and competitors. The propaganda is to pretend that a 24 hour cooldown and making it difficult to install externals apps is for the good of the user meanwhile stealing their data and giving it to anybody that pays for it.
People are getting hurt. Mass spying should stop now.
A scammer managed to convince a relative to share their screen during a Whatsapp video call. Luckly, said relative didn't use banking apps on the phone, the bank rejected as suspicious the transaction on the computer which would have sent money to the scammer, and the relative asked me for help before going to the ATM to unblock the account (I then contacted the bank and had them fully block the account as a precaution, and told my relative to go to the bank branch the next day to change the passwords and unblock the account).
1) make it optional
2) don't put it on a timer. What's most damning, in my opinion, is that this is the very definition of a bait-and-switch. Any rational person thinks this won't apply to their existing phone because it came before the rollout, right? They're wrong. That's just an accident then?
It's just a confession that none of these organizations - not the carriers, not the government, and not Evil Google, who are all confessing public that they are unfit for the responsibilities they've claimed.
Small businesses getting blocked by Gmail, Twilio, etc. for legitimate activities is constant.
The propaganda I'm seeing is coming from Google. I can't tell you how many times lately I've seen ads on TV/streaming pushing the security narrative for Play Store. Google knows what it is doing is blatantly anti-consumer and they very much want public sentiment to think it's not.
There will always be means to scam individuals through technology. Pulling stunts like this is not justified simply because it closes off one means of doing so.
And then you have the option:
- unverified packages either temporarily (7 days)
- or indefinitely
I have many coworkers who work very hard on this problem.
The claim that Google does not care about ads integrity runs counter to my experience.
Google may care a lot, but if my experience is any indicator they don't care enough.
Yes I understand that Google says they care a lot about scams and that there are people there working on blocking scams. But those are words. We need to look at money.
There is a very simple way that Google can block basically all scam ads: review all ads manually before approval, and allow no dynamic changes. They won’t do this, because it would implode their business model.
The goal is maintaining a continuous stream of revenue, not killing the stream for short term gains.
Google not only benefits from scam ads, they innovated the entire scam ad economy. Prior to the proliferation of automated online ad services, ads on TV, print media et al were carefully reviewed. There were very little scams.
Naturally such a business has a scaling cap. Online websites would collaborate with advertisers directly, and there were little to no scams. Then Google and others entered the picture and innovated automatic ads with virtually no human verification. After that, we saw an entire online scam ad economy explode.
It’s not just that Google doesn’t care enough about scam ads. They created scam ads, it’s their bread and butter. Not just Google either, we see the same thing with meta on their platforms. The scams will not go away.
It genuinely seems like the "ad integrity" department is a fig leaf to keep regulators away from the billion dollar scam ad business, and the people in said department believing otherwise doesn't convince me in the slightest. Soldiers in Afghanistan really thought they were liberators, but that doesn't mean that's actually why they were there
The real problem here is not that Google is doing this bad thing. The real problem is that they can do this bad thing. They shouldn't have this power. Something needs to be done to rain in Google and take back Android as an open platform.
Why should that be a concern to a phone OS provider? A concern so important that they are willing to cripple couple billions of devices.
Then, generally, "software is just a tool like a knife" doesn't hold because software today is more a service than a tangible good. Companies continue to update the programs and things can happen in the cloud with limited user control.
Nobody reads warnings or errors. StackOverflow is full of questions where someone pastes a clear error message and asks what they have to do when the very error message tells them the solution.
Also, scammers just tell people to ignore warnings and they do it. If someone is able to convince you that your child is in danger and that you have to bypass all warnings to help them, you _will_ do it.
Should Google be less than an asshole in all things? Yes.
I think there’s this like “something must be done now!” attitude of self-important, busybodies I can’t get behind… even if they’re right.
Why have people convinced themselves into thinking now is the most important thing in the world? That if it doesn’t happen now so that it makes me happy instantly it isn’t an option?
Evolution; social, tech, biological, legal, just fucking takes time, and that’s a feature.
There will be a period in which there’s a ton of food over there but your little fishy fins can’t get to it, and that sucks, but deal with it yourself, or just chill and let things happen. I promise if it’s important someone will solve it eventually and the scales do not need to be tipped for every little thing like phone app permissiveness.
In the meantime, you are free to not buy an android phone if you don’t like the system that Google has produced. You seem to think that because you can see its insides that it is collectively owned. It isn’t. Google owns it. Talk of talking it from its owners, is theft. In this case, justified entirely because you don’t like a process they decided on.
Don’t make me defend Google, I fucking hate Google.
The phone scammers who are saying the FBI/NSA/IRS will arrest you unless you install sketchy remote access software or other malware are rather convincing to a certain demographic of people and no amount of text on the screen will stop that. It all comes down to whether or not you view the tradeoff being that vulnerable people are worth protecting with this measure worldwide or not.
Hard disagree. My grandma is just going to follow the scammers directions.
If your grandma will follow current instructions, she will follow these new instructions including a 24 hour wait.
Your grandma will follow instructions to walk down to walgreens and buy a brand new device if they tell her. The solution has nothing to do with the device and everything to do with you needing to be an adult and figure out how to get your grandma to not follow directions of scammers.
This isn't a tech problem and you cannot solve it with tech.
A huge number of people just click accept to any popup they get because they're so fed up with seeing them. It's something that is often analysed in design of medical products
It was really difficult to explain to Korea that the additional warnings they wanted me to put in front of the tool operators were actually causing more harm than good. The cultural divide made this really difficult to approach.
"What do you mean the American mfg staff don't actually read everything?!"
"Yeah... Especially at the ATX line. We kind of go off vague shapes around here"
You can put a very clear warning symbol front and centre, and people will just mentally gloss over it
The best solution would have been to be able to mark ANY alternative app store like fdroid as trusted and no such cooldown period would hit everytime people install an app from there. This avoids using installed apps downloaded from an arbitrary URL but at the same time keeps the alternative app stores as a good alternative. Google decided to play unfair again.
I'm pretty convinced it is just Google testing boiling the water steady and slowly :)
Full disclosure, I am an iPhone user in part because I personally like living in the walled garden. But I also acknowledge that it has its downsides. I have a separate Android device just for language learning because the open source language learning app ecosystem is basically nonexistent on Apple’s locked-down platform. I’m not thrilled about the possibility of that ecosystem withering snd dying on Android, too.
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
I would turn this right around and say that until the proponents of this measure acknowledge that the Play Store is not safe and is in fact a primary vector for scams, you're just doing propaganda.
The correct move is to remove the (icon for) the google app store from inexperienced user's phones. (I'm dead serious, and it works)
Unfortunately, that's exactly the move that now gets sabotaged by this google change.
So sure I'll acknowledge the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate. It does in fact marginally mitigate the precise narrow risk they state, but introduces a fatal flaw in its place. Probably unwise to let naive users use android at all anymore after this.
The vast majority of tech support scams come through apps on the Play Store. Not only that, but malicious apps get approved on the Play Store constantly.
There is no reason to take any claim that this change is meant to mitigate scams seriously, because there's no evidence to support that it makes a noticeable dent in such activity.
What this change does noticeably and impactfully do, is prevent, via chilling effects, users from being able to use their phones in ways that could lose Google and its partner vendors post-sales revenue.
As you said, serving people should be the end in itself, and this change doesn't do that - it hurts people.
There are people at my gym who often have very bad form who I worry about. I will occasionally chat them up so they're not, for example, shoulder pressing with their arms outside of the scapular plane or benching without any arch in their back. Sometimes they appreciate it and ask me more questions. Sometimes they give me a terse 'thanks' and go back to doing it the way they want to do it.
If somehow every gym started forbidding people from using any equipment with which they could harm themselves unless they could prove, with a 24h cooling off period, that they knew the form and dangers in detail, I'm sure it would probably save a few people from suffering temporary injuries. I think it would also drive a lot of people away from any kind of sustained resistance training and be an overall net negative for public health.
Personally, I don't think such a nanny-state implementation is necessary? That you should be able to easily toggle off such a feature if you like and what happens to you happens. Perhaps there should be a 'tech-illiterate' mode toggled on by default but easily toggled off if you know how to access Developer Options with a little more forewarning about common scams. Perhaps gyms (or Google) could pay people to proactively assist and help people they see as the most vulnerable to certain kinds of exploits. Perhaps instead of spending time training Gemini to be a general-assist LLM they could train a very small local model to hyperspecifically guard against known intrusions.
There are so many more pro-social, less-draconian ways of tackling safety issues, from socialization to ongoing support to education efforts. A lockdown that just happens to also help ensure that they can extract their pound of flesh inside the abattoir that is Google Play seems at best overly protective and at worst just more corporate extraction of surplus value from individuals.
Simply add a setting to the phone for the technologically illiterate and/or young and old.
I can't even imagine how locked down and terrible the internet would be if we had this rhetoric around in the 90s.
I strongly agree with this statement.
If a piece of public communication is intended to sway the reader's opinion without informing them (or while selectively informing them, which is close to the same thing), it is propaganda.
I don't. An hour would make the same point and provide the same level of protection. So would clicking through a few screens with very simple and easy to understand warning messages about the risk of scams. Sure, it's a compromise, but it's pretty much the opposite of excellent.
24 hours might not be enough, and there is a risk that a scammer gets a user to go into developer mode and then calls back a few days later to try and 'fix the issue' or something. At least in 24 hours the victim might talk to someone about it and then find they're being scammed.
They main way that scams reach end users are through the willing participation of ad platforms, and even before DSA (not that much has changed) people (myself included) have done countless reports of straight up scam ads with no recourse and a templated "we have found nothing wrong with the ad".
As a data point, have you not seen the Tai Chi AI ads on YouTube that will "make you a different person by the end of the week" which where run by a company that sold you a subscription via dark patterns with all the surprises that brings (like a big headache of an unsubscribe process).
Or the fact that Meta knows that X% of it's ads are scam/phising and do nothing about it because it hurts the bottomline (an AI chat will help you with references).
The hypocrisy is too much coming from Google since they are owners of the machine that feed scams right to your doorstep.
And let's not ignore all the other fronts they are fighting on to further lock down the Android platform (such as not making source available immediately and moving more of the runtime in their play services and platform integrity nonsense).
If I have to wait 24h to install an app from another store, I demand the same to apply to AppStore. I see app stores just like browsers: users must have the ability to choose which browser they want when installing an operating system, and for Android, users must be able to select which app store they want and they should work the same way.
The risk of people cutting themselves is not a responsibility nor a concern for the knife manufacturers. I would be very upset if one day all kitchen knives would be sold blunt just to mitigate some clueless people from cutting their fingers off.
Similarly, I seriously and absolutely don't get it why people falling for scams should be a reason to require KYC to distribute apps.
Especially given that KYC-passed accounts are easily obtainable online for pennies.
Maybe before trying to go off half assed exactly like this outrage website does, you should take 5 minutes to be bothered to see if what you are saying is even mildly correct
People gotta learn. Sometimes the best teacher is pain and suffering. I wish that weren’t true, but in my time on this planet, there has never been more truth to “you can lead a horse to water, but you certainly can’t make it drink it.”
Trying to save people against their will just doesn’t seem the best path. I’d rather more effort be put into education on best practices, or investment in an app sniffer that can try and identify common attack vectors. Idk, anything other than “some people are too stupid for their own good, so now we all have less freedom.” I mean truly, if you’re worried about grandma’s phone safety, only let her buy an iPhone. No android for mi-ma.
All I see here is Google snatching at the opportunity to get some of that scrumptious walled garden money.
Apple's is a scam in comparison and must be repaid every year.
1. Is requiring developers to submit government ID actually an effective way to prevent tech support scams? Will scammers actually be deterred by a government ID requirement in addition to the existing developer registration process?
2. Is requiring developers to submit government ID the best option to prevent tech support scams? Are there other options that Google could use to make Android user less susceptible to tech support scams?
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
The tradeoff, such as it is, is acknowledged on keepandroidopen.org under the "But wait, isn't this...just about security?" section:
> The security rationale is a smokescreen. Google Play Protect already scans for malware independent of developer identity. Requiring a government ID doesn't make code safer.
Finally:
> Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
I don't think this is an excellent compromise. Scammers are persistent. I'm not convinced a 24 hour cooldown is enough to deter them in any meaningful way. I, on the other hand, am not persistent enough to wait 24 hours to install an Android app from F-Droid just to try it out.
There is a third position beside "I agree/disagree with the tradeoff", which is "I don't consider the tradeoff as stated truthful and refuse to frame the conversation that way".
Every closing of rights comes with a legitimate-sounding reason. Protect the children, etc. Most activist have been through this process enough times to see the play coming a mile away.
It is also surprising to see, on a place called hacker news, people defending closed systems and removal of agency from end users by giant corporations.
Thank you. When you see it once, it becomes so obvious everywhere else. Every single time it's just assertions without hard statistics, always perpetrated by the side that also happens to profit from it or accomplishes something else they really want to do. I'm not going to deny that the number of people who get scammed through sideloading isn't zero, but I don't have to accept as unwritten fact that these lockdowns are actually about that, or that this number of people is significant at all compared to everyone who just wants to install off-Google Play apps, like what Google implied and almost everyone here just accepted.
> It is also surprising to see, on a place called hacker news, people defending closed systems and removal of agency from end users by giant corporations.
The shift is shocking. One of my most popular comments, from no more than several months ago, was about this very topic. It was about the way Google will, like all other corporations, slowly ratchet up their 'measures' until there's no way left but their way. I basically retold that comment here, expanding on the process itself, and it's already at the near bottom of the thread. But the shift isn't unexpected. Lots of people here aren't the customizer, tinkerer, off the beaten path kind of 'hacker', but the tech enthusiast kind. Lots have direct links to Silicon Valley and the tech overlords of today. As the tech industry consumes everything else in the world, their rhetoric shifts from "Look at all these things we'll let you do!" to "We own you", so does the average sentiment of the users.
Why do we have to be lectured on how important this change is for their safety, while the Play store continues to be the primary location scam apps come from?
When do the companies get to be the ones that have to give up freedoms in favor of everyone else's safety?
I don't mind warnings and even brief cool downs but 24 hours is ridiculous.
If I lose or break my phone, I have to wait 24 hours after acquiring my new phone to use the apps I previously used? It's just absurd.
If I had to explain to clients that I was unable to do work until tomorrow, I'd be ridiculed.
> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
I would argue pretending like this is actually for anyone's security is propaganda hiding the fact that this is all for Google to tighten its grip on Android.
Personally, I'm sick and tired of dealing with corporate overreach based on the excuse that so many people are too stupid to operate the device responsibly.
I'm on a 3rd party, no goggle account, AOSP built OS. So I don't think this immediate change in 2027 will affect me.
While AOSP is a current workaround, this whole ability to build a non-goggle android via AOSP is also under threat from goggle lockdown.
That means this trend of having to part with the OS intended for the too stupid population is only going to increase.
So, needing to depart from android completely is in the near term.
Linux pones become ever more usable, including android in a jail.
The current furiphone is a great example.
https://furilabs.com/
They are recommending installing F-droid.. and not accepting android's demands. Its time to have open source smart phone operating system that can not be taken hostage.
https://www.mobian.org/
https://nura.eco/
otherwise my next phone will be linux
whats the way forward?
...
30 cents out of every dollar, you say?
There is plenty of warning and friction to be able to do that already.
Thanks for the suggestion, how didn't I think about that!