I can bet that a few versions down the line, the "Not recommended" option of allowing installs indefinitely will become so not recommended that they'll remove it outright. Then shrink the 7 day window to 3 days or less. Or only give users one allowed attempt at installing an app, after which it's another 24 hour waiting period for you. Then ask the user to verify themselves as a developer if they want to install whatever they want. Whatever helps them turn people away from alternatives and shrink the odds of someone dislodging their monopoly, they will do. Anything to drive people to Google Play only.
1. Chrome
2. Google
3. Default browser app (w/unfamiliar generic logo)
They removed the option for Safari some time in the last two years; here's how it looked in 2024: https://imgur.com/1iBVFfc
And the cherry on top of dark UX patterns: an unchecked toggle rests at the bottom. "Ask me which app to use every time." You cannot stop getting these.
Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution. It's unsustainable in the long run. Also, the last thing this world needs right now is even more centralization of power. Especially around yet another US company.
People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet. They should not use internet banking. They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash. And the society should be able to accommodate such people — which is not that hard, really. Just roll back some of the so-called innovations that happened over the last 15 years. Whether someone uses technology, and how much they do, should be a choice, not a burden.
Sounds great in theory, but just today I was reminded how impossible this is when walking back from lunch, I noticed all the parking meters covered with a hood, labelled with instructions on how to pay with the app.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/city-of-regina-r...
This isn't about how skilled a person is, it is about tackling social engineering. The article gave the example of someone posing as a relative, it could also be a blackmail scheme, but it could also be the carefully planned takeover of a respected open source project (ahem, xz).
What I am saying is this sort of crime affect anyone. We simply see more of it among the vulnerable because they are the low hanging fruit. Raising the bar will only change who is vulnerable. Society is simply too invested in technology to dissuade criminals. Which is why I don't think this will work, and why I think going nuclear on truly independent developers is going to do more damage than good.
But this is the wrong take. I expect to go to a restaurant and not die from the food… and I want nothing to do with the inner workings of the kitchen. I just want to know any restaurant I go into will be safe. Society has made restaurants safe, either because of government pressure or it’s good for business.
How is that not a fair ask for technology, too? We all have things we know well, and then there’s reasons we’re alive that we don’t even know exist because someone took care of it.
It’s unreasonable to only allow people to participate in society once they understand every nuance.
Apple's argument for locking down the iPhone but not the Mac has always been some variation of "Mac users are professionals and iPhones are for everyone." Fine! Where can I buy the unrestricted iPhone? As far as I'm concerned, basically every problem could be solved if Apple would put the Security Research Device on an unlisted page of their online store for the general public. Normies won't buy it, and I will.
That train has left the station decades ago. The internet has become an essential part of modern societies. People can't not use the internet (or smartphones), at least if they don't live in the woods.
People who aren't technically sophisticated should choose the smartphone ecosystem that was designed to offer the safety of a walled garden from the start.
Google sold Android as the ecosystem that gave users the freedom to do anything they like, including shooting themselves in the foot.
Google should not be allowed to fraudulently go back on their promise now that they have driven the other open ecosystems out of the marketplace.
The problem isnt with technology. The problem is with physical ownership versus copyright/trademark/patent ownership in abeyance of physical ownership.
I go to a store and buy a device. I have a receipt showing a legal and good sale. This device isnt mine, even if a receipt says so.
The software (and now theres ALWAYS software) isnt mine and can never be mine. My ownership is degraded because a company can claim that I didn't buy a copy of software, or that its only licensed, or they retain control remotely.
And the situation is even worse if the company claims its a "digital restriction", ala DMCA. Then even my 1st amendment speech rights are abrogated AND my ownership rights are ignored.
It would not be hard to right this sinking ship.
1. Abolish DMCA.
2. Establish that first sale doctrine is priority above copyright/patent/trademark
3. Tax these 'virtual property rights'
4. Have FTC find any remote control of sold goods be considered as fraudulently classified indefinite rental (want to rent? State it as such)Are they really though? does the average person really care about side loading? I think we are in an echo chamber. I can't picture any of the people in my life installing things from outside of an app store on their phone. However I realize that's purely anecdotal, it would be nice to see actual statistics on this to have a more informed decision.
How do you plan to decide who gets to use internet banking and who doesn't? That doesn't seem like a good road to be going down, either.
Consider an older technology that became fundamental to much of daily life a century or two ago: writing. After a few millennia where literacy was a specialized skill, we pretty quickly transitioned to a society where it was essential for common activities. Rather than make sure everything had pictures and such to accommodate the illiterate, we tried to make it so that the entire population is literate, and came pretty close to succeeding. There are people who just outright can't read for whatever reason, but they're a very small minority and we aim to accommodate them by giving them assistance so they can get by in a literate world, rather than changing the world so you don't need to be able to read to live a normal life.
Rather than saying that half the population (a low estimate, I believe, for how many people will fall prey to malware in an anything-goes world) should abandon this technology, we should work to make it so they don't have to, with some combination of education and technological measures.
Even if they're the majority?
(Keep in mind that as average lifespan keeps getting longer while birth rates keep going lower, demographics will tend to skew older and older. Already happened in Japan; other developed countries will catch up soon.)
> They should probably not have a bank account at all and just stick to cash.
You know that these (mostly) don't fall into this category of being "hopeless with [modern] technology" because they're cognitively impaired, right?
Mostly, the people who most benefit by these protections, are just people 1. with full lives, who 2. are old enough that when they were first introduced to these kinds of technologies, it came at a time in their life when they already had too much to do and too many other things to think/care about, to have any time left over for adapting their thinking to a "new way of doing things."
This group of people still fully understands, and can make fluent use of, all the older technologies "from back in their day" that they did absorb and adapt to earlier in their lives, back when they had the time/motivation to do so. They can use a bank account; they can make phone calls and understand voicemail; they can print and fax and probably even email things. They can, just barely, use messaging apps. But truly modern inventions like "social media' confound them.
Old bigcorps with low churn rates are literally chock-full of this type of person, because they've worked there since they were young. That's why these companies themselves can sometimes come off as "out of touch", both in their communications and in their decision-making. But those companies don't often collapse from mismanagement. Things still get done just fine. Just using slower, older processes.
Those groups of people are Google's paying customers. Google will, of course, defer to the ones who need more help to be safe online over the ones who don't. That's how you create a safe ecosystem.
Nobody is forcing you to use a smartphone. If your work needs you to use some app, they’ll buy you a phone if they respect you.
If you’re so upset just stop using it. But you won’t.
People frequently talk about this with respect to AI and ads and how it’s bad for people to be use these things. I recommend we disallow the internet entirely for classes of people whose minds are not ready for the downsides of the tech.
With your Adderall prescription should come a phone number to sign up to the government proctoring service.
Google doesn't give one single shit if users download malware from the Play Store, but hypothetical malware from third party sources is so much worse that we need to ruin the whole OS? That doesn't pass the sniff test.
Google wants to make sure you can only download malware from developers who give google a cut. They want to control the OS and remove user choice. That's all it is. That's what it's always been about.
"Protecting users" is a pretense and nothing more. Google does not care at all about user safety. They aren't even capable of caring at this point. There are far, far cheaper and more effective ways to actually protect users, and google isn't doing any of them.
This is about Google wanting more control over their ecosystem.
Pretty much illegal in some parts of EU
So long as the 5g chips and the 2 mobile app stores remain under control, then 5 eyes has nearly full coverage.
We need to move back to putting users back into full control. Machines (including computers) should ALWAYS respect the input of the user, even if the user is wrong.
If a person shoots themself with a gun as a result of their incompetence, we don't fault the gun manufacturer for not designing the gun to prevent auto-execution. If you can't operate a firearm safely, you shouldn't attempt to operate a firearm.
Similarly, if a person deliberately points their car a solid object and accelerates into it, the actions of the operator shouldn't be the car manufacturer's responsibility. We need to get rid of ESC, ABS, AEB, etc. These features have created a whole slew of drivers who speed headfirst into the back of stationary drivers and expect their car to stop itself. This works right up until a sensor fails and the operator flies through the windshield (usually people like this don't wear seat-belts). If you can't drive, you shouldn't be driving until you rectify your incompetence.
Similarly, phones and computers should respect user input. If a users wants root access to their personal device, they should be able to get root access. If a user runs "rm -rf --no-preserve-root /" as root, the device should oblige and delete everything, since that is what the operator instructed it to do. If you can't be trusted to use a computer, you shouldn't be using a computer until you rectify your incompetence.
The lack of accountability in modern society is disgusting, and it leads to much deeper societal problems when people refuse to better themselves and instead expect the world to shield them from their willful ignorance.
That's ridiculous. Phones are being made more and more of a requirement to participate in society, including by governments.
It's selfish to advocate against better protections for the least able people in the world just for our own convenience.
- Must enable developer mode -- some apps (e.g., banking apps) will refuse to operate and such when developer mode is on, and so if you depend on such apps, I guess you just can't sideload?
- One-day (day!!!) waiting period to activate (one-time) -- the vast majority of people who need to sideload something will probably not be willing to wait a day, and will thus just not sideload unless they really have no choice for what they need. This kills the pathway for new users to sideload apps that have similar functionality to those on the Play Store.
The rest -- restarting, confirming you aren't being coached, and per-install warnings -- would be just as effective alone to "protect users," but with those prior two points, it's clear that this is just simply intended to make sideloading so inconvenient that many won't bother or can't (dev mode req.).
Hi, I'm the community engagement manager @ Android. It's my understanding that you don't have to keep developer options enabled after you enable the advanced flow. Once you make the change on your device, it's enabled.
If you turn off developer options, then to turn off the advanced flow, you would first have to turn developer options back on.
>- One-day (day!!!) waiting period to activate (one-time) -- the vast majority of people who need to sideload something will probably not be willing to wait a day, and will thus just not sideload unless they really have no choice for what they need.
ADB installs are not impacted by the waiting period, so that is an option if you need to install certain unregistered applications immediately.
What apps are those? I've yet to run into any of my banking apps that refuse to run with developer mode enabled. I've seen a few that do that for rooted phones but that's a different story. I've been running android for a decade and a half now with developer mode turned on basically the whole time and never had an app refuse to load because of it.
Something like Github's approach of forcing users to type the name of the repo they wish to delete would seem to be more than sufficient to protect technically disinclined users while still allowing technically aware users to do what they please with their own device.
Isn't that the objective? "Reducing scams" is the same kind of argument as "what about the children"; it's supposed to make you stop thinking about what it means, because the intentions are so good.
And you blame Google for this? First of all, banks chose to make apps work this way, not Google. Moreover, they chose this likely due to scams. That proves scamming on android IS an issue that needs some technical solution.
JFC. Why would an app be allowed to know this? Just another datapoint for fingerprinting.
That said, it may be that I've simply been lucky and have an encountered that yet. So I'll be keeping an eye out for it.
Enable dev mode, sideload the apk, then disable dev mode. I'd argue that it is poor security practice to keep developer mode enabled long-term on a phone that is used for everyday activities, such as banking.
But this process seems pretty reasonable to me.
I'd like to think it is due in part to the efforts of F-Droid and others.
Waiting a day, once, to disable this protection doesn't seem like a big deal to me. I'd probably do it once when I got a phone and then forget about it.
I happen to have developer mode enabled right now, for no good reason other than I never disabled last time I needed it. Haven't had any issues with any apps.
I actually think these protections could help mitigate scammers.
I disagree with this. Won't somebody who need to sideload something will just try again the next day...
Have these companies sent out their people to old age homes to teach old people how to use their tech and how avoid scams? If you lock the system down at max level, scams will just move offline again or find another way. Same if they build backdoors into encryption or make chats data available to gov agents: all illicit comms will just move off the network or find another smarter way. Its just how nature works, we are seeing tech-evolution in realtime.
[1] https://liberapay.com/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberapay [3] https://opencollective.com/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Collective
If we start today, we could have a new phone in 2-3 years. Future generations will thank us.
It's not just phones. There is a concerted movement by massively-moneyed folks to destroy the fabric of open society, so there are a number of different areas that need attention. A coordinated effort across the breadth of society to restore, maintain or improve the foundations of open society.
At least half of the apps I use on a daily basis come from f-droid. This enforced 24-hour wait is simply not acceptable. Android has always been a far inferior overall user experience compared to iPhone. Android's _only_ saving grace was that I could put my own third-party open-source apps on it. There is nothing left keeping me on Android now.
I'll probably get an iPhone next, but I do sincerely hope this hastens progress on a real "Linux phone" for the rest of us. Plasma Mobile (https://plasma-mobile.org) looks very nice indeed. I'll be more than happy to contribute to development and funding.
Phones, by their nature, are always internet connected (obviously there are instances where that isn't the case)...so if 90% of my apps are actually just web apps then that's fine. The opensource aspect of this should be: I build and run my own infrastructure (on cloud servers or my own servers) that serves up the web apps.
Sure, this isn't something that 'normal' people would do...but they aren't side loading apps anyway.
The web is decentralised, as long as we choose it to be. We need to take advantage of this property.
It's not a win by any means. I hope that we don't stop making noise.
Yet, they are concerned about this.
It has nothing to do with safety, but everything to do with control.
I remember when Google disabled call recording in Android, so you no longer could record scammers. Thanks to recording I was able to get money back from insurance company that claimed they absolutely didn't sell me this and that over the phone (paid for premium insurance and got basic).
It's a a defeat, albeit a minor one. The defeats will escalate until there's nothing left to lose. "Normies" don't care and the tech people who do care are fewer and further between than you'd think.
Most of the apps on my phone are installed from F-Droid. I guess the next time I get a new phone I'll have to wait at least 24 hours for it to become useful.
I'm seriously considering Graphene for a next personal device and whatever the cheapest iOS device is for work.
I wonder how this will play out in the phones coming out of the Motorola+GrapheneOS partnership.
The one time per device (not per app/install) is annoying, but seems like a reasonable tradeoff between preventing bad installs and allowing legit installs. I can't think of any obviously better ways.
I realise some disagree with the entire premise. I think refusing to accept the reason given doesn't advance the discussion though and I am very interested in what a better experience that is trying to solve the same problems could look like.
I really extremely rarely open the Play Store.
F-Droid is my place to. Even if the tools are simple, they are reliable.
Maybe Google is also scared, that with coding agents some OSS Tools improve that much that commercial alternatives don't matter.
Like when Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al. cooperated with¹ the unconstitutional and illegal² PRISM program to hand over bulk user data to the NSA without a warrant? That kind of harm to my personal data that I did not intend?
If so, I'd love to hear an explanation of why every Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, and Microsoft application haven't been removed for being malware already.
¹ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...
² https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/us-court-mass...
As for the IDs, I think what happens is that Google sees no need to have hobbyists anymore in the ecosystem. Companies are easier to deal with, easier to change ecosystem to what's needed for Google. While for app development companies, there will be a single enterprise account with some ID used for many developers. And companies just shut up and follow almost any non-financial requirements Google wants to add.
In contrast, opensource developers frequently go public advocating for user privacy and data prorection, while companies tend to be on the same side as Google squeezing any bit of personal user data to sell it for any margin possible.
Is any open mobile device and OS ecosystem possible at this point of time, other than the hobbyist one? With closed gates of LTE/5G ecosystem it seems there's no such possible at all.
Google has become an extremely selfish company.
This will sadly still put a major damper on adoption of open source apps, while giving a false sense of security that apps from the Play store are safe.
Years down the road, the low usage of apps installed from outside the Play store will be used as an argument for removing the functionality completely.
We get occasional support tickets about the popups that come when trying to run a regular installer while in this mode. Luckily, people can disable "S" mode, but there's no way to re-enable "S" mode without a fresh install.
1: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/switching-out-of...
Wondering how long the blogpost would be if it explained what the flow for corpoloading applications approved by Google's shareholders would be?
The casual cynicism on this website really is something.
This is smart.
But putting my design hat on here: couldn't this be the whole approach? When enabling the "unverified apps" setting, the phone could terminate all running apps and calls before walking the user through the process.
Why do you even need the rest of the complexity -- if the fear is that non-savvy users are being coached into installing malware,then preventing comms while fiddling with the settings seems pretty OK?
You could even combine this with randomised UI, labels etc. so it's not possible to coach someone in advance about what to press.
No, because protecting users is just an excuse. The overreach is the goal.
A scammer is going to be familiar with the flow and can also just... call again?
"Just follow x, y, z and I will call back to help you"
I understand there is some problem trying to be solved here, but honestly this is still quite frustrating for legitimate uses. If this is the direction that computing is moving, I'd really rather there were separate products available for power users/devs that reflected our different usage.
This is ridiculous. Google is trying to dismantle the concept of ownership and personal autonomy. Do not give them any ground.
Apple and Google can now credibly claim to governments to have nearly ubiquitous computing platforms that they can guarantee do not run any software that is not approved or antithetical to the goals of authorities. This makes the device safe for storing things like government IDs. OSs and Browsers will be required to present these IDs or at first just attest to them.
Before posting online, renting a server, using an app you will have to idenitfy yourself using your phone or similarly locked down PC (i.e. mac).
The introduction is under the guise as always of protecting the children. In reality they are removing your rights to privacy and free speech.
2) You can use ADB to immediately install unregistered apps. ADB installs are not subject to the waiting period.
Even before Google's edict I disabled enforced Android updates in case that at Google's demand manufacturers slipstreamed some restrictive code that cannot be later removed. One only has to look at the disastrous precedent with Windows 11 to see how insidious and ever-increasing lock-in works.
Fact is Big Tech cannot be trusted and there's a long lineage to prove it—MS Windows, Sun/OpenOffice and many others—and now Android. To avoid future calamities like this and to ensure survival of F-Droid, et al we urgently need to break Big Tech's nexus with open source independent of Big Tech's control.
I can only hope more manufacturers are prepared to fork Android to cater for the upcoming demand.
More people moving to GrapheneOS is the best tool we have against Google's continued and escalating hostility to user freedom and privacy and general anti-competitive conduct. (Of course, you could ditch having a smartphone entirely..., but if you're willing to consider that you don't need me plugging an alternative).
Admittadly I was being lazy and not checking if Line works on it yet, but I'll be finding that out this weekend it seems.
I will die on this hill.
I wanted to be negative about the whole idea, as due to my age I'm resentful of not being allowed to use my own computer as I see fit.
On the other hand, in principle I see what they're going for here. The only decent argument for these user-hostile lockdowns is the malware issue.
If you get most/all of your apps from F-Droid, they're essentially establishing a policy of "any time you get a new phone, you can't use it for 24 hours", which is... insane?
Even if that's not the case, I'd imagine attestation apps like banking apps would require some kind of identity verification in exchange for trusting Graphene's keys.
In principle it doesn't make sense to leave any escape hatch, but I guess as always, it boils down to economy.
There are alternatives that don’t: Mobian, Ubuntu Touch, PureOS, postmarketOS, Sailfish OS.
I don't quite understand how those installs would be tracked. If I create a "hobbyist" account and share the apk, are the devices that install that app all reporting it to Google? To my knowledge, Google only does this through the optional Play Protect system, is that now no longer optional? I'd like to know if my computer is reporting every app I install up to Google.
Oh, how times have changed. And so many believed this and repeated it.
When I side-load open-source apps for other people, I want to do it right in the moment, not activate the feature, and the next time I see them (like half a year later), install the app.
When Google announced there would be an alternative installation method, I did not expect such a mess...
"I did not expect such a mess", I certainly did. Another arm of the push to remove anonymity online.
What stops scammers from simply creating a new hobbyist account for every 20 people they scam?
This still isn't a good idea. It's not going to materially improve security for anyone, so all the negatives (beaten to death here and elsewhere) are still top-of-mind.
Companies get away from this because they distance themselves from their customers and they have systems to hide feedback.
This is just spreading fear. If you're being coerced to do this, then you're in a much bigger danger than what a rogue application sideloaded to your phone represents.
No, I'm afraid this is tipping the scale of control in Google's favor.
We know from Nigerian email scams that these things can stretch out days, weeks, months, all to get the victim to do the thing.
> We know from Nigerian email scams that these things can stretch out days, weeks, months, all to get the victim to do the thing.
but it seems govts arent interested or incapable of solving the causes (education, opportunity, destitution, etc etc) and probably also influx of scams from sanctioned countries (again a society/world level problem) that cant participate in the world trade etc...
so they lean on the technology companies to lockdown things more because what else can they do?
There's another class of scams where the draw is fear - "your son is in jail", "your bank account is under investigation and will be closed in 24 hours if you don't act now", &c. They rely on time pressure to prevent the victim from reaching out directly to the parties they're lying about and disproving the scam.
This is aimed at that particular type of scam and that particular type of victim.
Now, phone thieves just ask you at knifepoint or gunpoint to log out of iCloud
Its just installing an app.
As others have suggested, there should be an option skip the 24hr wait when activating at setup time. Or, alternatively, when the previous phone one is transferring from has it enabled it should be without wait time on the new one.
Because if that "enforcement" is Google then they are still engineering a situation where they hold the keys to the kingdom. They may benevolently let you install what you want, but the sword of damacles will hang over everyone forever, with the darth vader contract in full force ("pray we don't change the deal any further"). If nothing else, it will have a chilling effect. But more than likely, it will attract regulators like moths to a flame to coerce Google into banning their favorite open source apps that they don't like. In other words: it won't solve anything at all, really.
I just remain skeptical that this tactic is successful on modern Android, with all the settings and scare screens you need to go through in order to sideload an app and grant dangerous permissions.
I expect scammers will move to pre-packaged software with a bundled ADB client for Windows/Mac, then the flow is "enable developer options" -> "enable usb debugging" -> "install malware and grant permissions with one click over ADB". People with laptops are more lucrative targets anyway.
The use case they're trying to protect against is malware authors "coaching" users to install their app.
In November, they specifically called out anonymous malware apps with the permission to intercept text messages and phone calls (circumventing two-factor authentication). https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
After today's announced policy goes into effect, it will be easier to coach users to install a Progressive Web App ("Installable Web Apps") than it will be to coach users to sideload a native Android app, even if the Android app has no permissions to do anything more than what an Installable Web App can do: make basic HTTPS requests and store some app-local data. (99% of apps need no more permissions than that!)
I think Google believes it should be easy to install a web app. It should be just as easy to sideload a native app with limited permissions. But it should be very hard/expensive for a malware author to anonymously distribute an app with the permission to intercept texts and calls.
That's why I don't think the extra prompts matter much beyond raising attacker cost a bit. Google is patching the visible path while the scam just moves one hop sideways.
I don't believe that it is. I follow this "scene" pretty closely, and that means I read about successful scams all the time. They happen in huge numbers. Yet I have never encountered a reliable report of one that utilized a "sideloaded"[1] malicious app. Not once. Phishing email messages and web sites, sure. This change will not help counter those, though.
I don't even see what you could accomplish with a malicious app that you couldn't otherwise. I would certainly be interested to hear of any real world cases demonstrating the danger.
[1] When I was a kid, this was called "installing."
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...?
Edit: I've put one up there now - if there's a better article, let us know and we can change it again. I put the submitted URL in the toptext.
What concrete change to the policy would be a strict Pareto improvement keeping just those two concerns in mind?
There are at least three moral arguments that can be made:
- Google, as a capitalist company, is ignoring the privacy and FOSS implications, and is guilty of screwing the customer due to greed
- Regular, non-tech folks are constantly being robbed of their privacy, money, and/or identity through malware and social engineering attacks, and Google is guilty of not doing enough to protect them
- Enabling malware delivery and use props up criminals and known bad actors (e.g., north korean), and by not stopping this Google is guilty of supporting these bad actors
I'm not seeing either of those last two points being made strongly. Maybe it's just not the target audience — people here aren't as likely to be scammed, and few of us are regularly thinking about north korea — but I'd expect to see more consideration for the costs of inaction here.
Just call it "installing".
The security justification for this measure is not credible.
Obviously permissions would be a problem, as you can't update the app manifest, so there would either have to be one shell app per publisher (which would at least solve the problem of installing updates for their apps) or the shell would need its own internal system for managing permissions (like a browser does). Maybe it could also sandbox different apps from each other in different subprocesses, unless that needs root privileges, but maybe it's possible with Landlock?
Or we can always fall back to the "sweet solution" Steve Jobs offered us with the original iPhone, and just let the web browser be the shell.
Or implement everything as WeChat mini programs.
Let’s be clear here.
- You need to enable developer mode
- You need to click through a few scare dialogs
- You need to wait 24h once
I wonder how long this will last before they lock it down further. There was a lot of pushback this time around and they still ended up increasing the temperature of the metaphorical boiling frog. It still seems like they're pushing towards the Apple model where those who don't want to self-dox and/or pay get a very limited key (what Google currently calls "limited distribution accounts").
This is so overt.
Even though I understand the design decisions here, I think we're going about this the wrong way. Sure, users can be pressured into allowing unverified apps and installing malware, and adding a 24-hour delay will probably reduce the number of victims, but ultimately, the real solution here is user education, not technological guardrails.
If I want to completely nuke my phone with malware, Google shouldn't stand in my way. Why not just force me to read some sort of "If someone is rushing you to do this, it is probably an attack" message before letting me adjust this setting?
Anyone who ignores that warning is probably going to still fall for the scam. If anything, scammers will just communicate the new process, and it risks sounding even more legitimate if they have to go through more Google-centric steps.
* confirm that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day
* confirm with biometrics that you know what you are doing
* decide if you only want unrestricted installs for 1 week or forever
* confirm that you accept the risks
* enjoy the few apps that still have developers motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this
I suspect they are hoping users just give up and go to the play store instead. Google touts about "Play Protect" which scans all apps on the device, even those from unknown sources so these measures can barely be justified.
Imagine if Microsoft said you need to wait 24 hours before installing a program not from their store, which is against the entire premise of windows.
Computing, I once believed was based on an open idea that people made software and you could install it freely, yes there are bad actors, but that's why we had antivirus and other protection methods, now we're inch by inch losing those freedoms. iOS wants you to enter your date of birth now.
The future feels very uncertain, but we need to protect the little freedoms we have left, once they're gone, they're gone for good.
It's time to leave Android.
Call me naive, but despite the feeling in my gut I was holding out for Google's answer. Reading what it is, this is still going way too far. You essentially need to be a developer in order to sideload, which brings Android down to parity with iOS.
No, being able to sideload (on my phones, AND friends and family as-needed) is a fundamental computing right. This is my personal belief. And this move by Google is a step too far.
The search begins...
Is it really worth executing payments, maps, geospatial APIs, etc. on one platform if >30% of your customer base can't use it and it changes every 6 months (because that's what they've engineered)? No. Who wants to maintain that?
Then what is the interface people are pushed to? The browser, where Google historically dominates.
If you can enable this once, forever, after a 24 hour cooldown period I don't hate this as much as I hated some of the other proposals from Google. It'll just be something you do as part of the setup for a new phone.
Do I love it? Absolutely not. But F-Droid was facing an existential threat from the early early versions of the proposal and now will continue to live. Again, I don't love it but this is a huge change to the fate of F-Droid.
The reality is that users should take responsibility but are not allowed to, so Google takes over and makes a profit.
You don't need a CS degree to use a phone, but you can be a power user by time....but not anymore, the company needs you to stay fool and pay for "help" (not directly sometime).
This is a marketing tactic, similar to a side-load.
Alternatives like GrapheneOS and Lineage are the way to go for right now, but I worry as things get more and more locked down that those options won't work with a lot of apps.
Again, can we, please, stop call it side-loading. I'm not sliding in anything "from the side" on the sly, I am simply installing an app of my choice on my damn phone.
How the advanced flow works for users
Enable developer mode in system settings: Activating this is simple. This prevents accidental triggers or "one-tap" bypasses often used in high-pressure scams.
Confirm you aren't being coached: There is a quick check to make sure that no one is talking you into turning off your security. While power users know how to vet apps, scammers often pressure victims into disabling protections.
Restart your phone and reauthenticate: This cuts off any remote access or active phone calls a scammer might be using to watch what you’re doing.
Come back after the protective waiting period and verify: There is a one-time, one-day wait and then you can confirm that this is really you who’s making this change with our biometric authentication (fingerprint or face unlock) or device PIN. Scammers rely on manufactured urgency, so this breaks their spell and gives you time to think.
Install apps: Once you confirm you understand the risks, you’re all set to install apps from unverified developers, with the option of enabling for 7 days or indefinitely. For safety, you’ll still see a warning that the app is from an unverified developer, but you can just tap “Install Anyway.”Or maybe it is and android's promises about openness are dead.
I don't have a Google account on my Androids. But I can't remove play services on them, sadly. As an intermediate protection I just don't sign in to Google play, that gives them at least a bit less identifying information to play with.
I hope this can be done without a Google account.
Google's decision to walk back the supposed freedom to run anything you like removes user choice from the marketplace and harms consumers.
This is exactly what Google intended. This is why they started off by announcing completely removing device owner chosen installs (this is not side loading! It's simply installing.) and announced only apps allowed by Google would be available for install.
They knew it would cause backlash. They anticipated that and planned ahead faking a compromise.
They are trying to boil us like frogs by so slowly raising the temperature so we do not notice. Whenever the water gets so warm that people do notice they cool it down a little. But they will turn up the the heat again!
This 24h window is designed to make device owner controlled installs as unattractive as possible. They try to reduce it as much as they can while having plausible deniability ("You can still install apps not whitelisted by us"). They want to get the concept of people installing software of their own choice onto their own device as far away from the mainstream as possible. They want to marginalize it. They want to slowly and quietly kill off the open Android app ecosystem by reducing the user base.
The next step will be them claiming that barely anyone is installing apps not signed by them anyway. First they make people jump through ridiculous hoops to install non whitelisted apps, then they use the fact that few people jump through these hoops to justify removing the ability altogether.
Google does not care about preventing scams. If they did they would do something against the massive amount of scam ads that they host. Scams are just their "think of the children".
Do not play by their playbook!
Do not give them ground!
We must not accept any restrictions on the software we run on our own devices. The concept of ownership, personal autonomy and choice are being dismantled. Our freedom is the target of a slow, long waging war. This is yet another attack.
We must not compromise with the attacker. We must not give them any centimeter of ground.
Google could make a mobile website to take an app apk and verify it if its secure and offer to install it back to android users ...
My bias, former Android app developer.
This is using the increase in attacks to do a business monopoly goal instead...
- New toaster requires permission from manufacturer to toast bread from a local bakery.
- Car manufacturer to vet all passengers. Any unidentified and unvetted passengers will disable the vehicle.
- TV manufacturer requires 7 days advance notice of what you want to watch.
Being treated as a toddler by an organization that is itself completely disfunctional is mzking me angry.
The fact that I can sideload whatever I need and stay out of Google's ecosystem is the whole reason I use Android. Given the miserable choice between two fully locked-down platforms, why would I pick theirs?
The 7 days vs forever choice is still crappy and gives me a bit of bad vibes considering they are the ones that pulled the youtube promotions (shorts, games) you can never turn off forever, so there's the concern they will remove the forever option from Android in the future. But as long as they don't end up doing that, it's fine for me.
Also, I do think it would be a good idea to make an exception to the 24-hour wait time if the phone is new enough (e.g. onboarding steps were completed less than one day ago), and/or through some specific bypass method using ADB. Power users who get a new phone want to set it up with all their cool apps and trinkets right away, and it's not good user experience to have to use ADB to install every single sideloaded app. Meanwhile a a regular user getting scammed right after getting a new phone is statistically unlikely.
Curious how this will play out for niche apps that aren’t on the Play Store.
The onus of protecting people's wealth should fall on the bank / institution who manages that persons wealth.
Nevertheless, this solution is better than ID verification for devs.
Dangerous software is software that is not making Google money and that does not give Google control.
I appreciate if some good samaritan can link to it.
Yeah, I know... Stockholm syndrome...
Although I may not have to live with it, as none of my present devices are recent enough to still receive ota updates.
Context: I don't use alternative app stores. I occasionally side-load updates to apps that I've written myself, and very occasionally third party apps from trusted sources.
Also, was this really necessary Google?
The truth is that 99.9% of the people don't care. The remaining 0.1% is perfectly capable to use GrapheneOS.
What's the solution for 3rd world countries where 80% phones are android (and usually old/low spec) that balances freedom for knowledgeable users vs security/safety for the majority of users? you can roughly understand education level and tech literacy for the majority of people in 3rd world countries.
If so, it's clear that none of these changes are actually to protect users.
Google details new process to install unverified Android apps. The sentence is much more clear using established language. Not "side-load", whatever that means.
How much can you twist words and language to engage in fear mongering? The headline could just as well have been "install", and "free choice" and "Google gatekeeps".
Now if only Android would allow for stronger sandboxing of apps (i.e. lie to them about any and all system settings).
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
Let's be realistic, there IS a problem with sideloaded apps being downloaded by ignorant people, and they do get scammed/hacked or whatever.
This leads to unhappy people complaining to their banks, politicians and media, these in turn starts lighting a fire under Googles bottom.
So, my point being, how do we solve the ACTUAL problem with rogue apps then?
dear google: fuck off and die. May something worth the resources it consumes grow from your fetid corpse.
Does it have a Linux kernel? Of course. But this isn't a free operating system.
Man, fuck Google. I hope this bullshit is struck down by government regulation as malicious compliance to 3rd party app stores.
I wonder if GrapheneOS will have the same level of user-hostile bullshit. That may be my salvation board right now.
Sailfish OS would be great, but unfortunately my banks don't seem to play along with it.
Assuming the requirements are actually justified, this seems like a tolerable compromise.
And no, I'm not a bot or some pro Google activist, check my github account, I even use GrapheneOS myself.
Having to wait a day for a one off isn't a big deal, if they kept it looser then you'd be shouting about the amount of scams that propagate on the platform.