The part in the flow where you select between allowing app installs for 7 days or forever is a glimpse into the future. That toggle shows the thought process that's going on at Google.
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.
Apple was clear that they were offering the safety of a walled garden from the start.
Apple didn't lie about supporting a user's freedom to run anything they like, only to execute a rug pull after they successfully drove the other open options out of the marketplace.
Which increases the limit to whatever time is left on your current payment period. After which the app will stop working and need to be reinstalled by an authenticated developer who has a current Apple Developer Subscription.
EDIT: Edited the above which previously said 90 days incorrectly. Not sure where my brain pulled that from but I posted the correct details here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743615
Notably if you install a month before your subscription expires you need to reinstall the app in 1 month.
Would you support Microsoft doing the same thing to Windows?
These are general purpose computing devices. It's sure taking a long time, but Cory Doctorow's talk on the war on general purpose computing is sure starting to become a depressing reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
All apps should be open source and subject to verification by nonprofit repositories like F-Droid which have scary warnings on software that does undesirable things. For-profit appstores like Google and Apple that allow closed source software are too friendly to scams and malware.
I don't think that's a realistic suggestion as as the quantity of applications are huge who are going to spend time reviewing them one by one. And and even then it's not realistic to expect that that undesirable things can be detected as these things can be hidden externally for instance or obfuscated
Not the parent or agreeing/disagreeing with them, but to your question: if you get creative, there are a lot of things you could do, some more unorthodox than others.
Tongue-in-cheek example, just to get the point across: instead of calling it Developer Mode, call it "Scam mode (dangerous)". Require pressing a button that says "Someone might be scamming me right now." Then require the user to type (not paste) in a long sentence like "STOP! DO NOT CONTINUE IF SOMEONE IS TELLING YOU TO DO THIS! THIS IS A SCAM!"... you get the idea. Maybe ask them to type in some Linux command with special symbols to find the contents of some file with a random name. Then require a reboot for good measure and maybe require typing in another bit of text like "If a stranger told me to do this, it's a scam." Basically, make it as ridiculous and obnoxious as possible so that the message gets across loud and clear to anybody who doesn't know what they're doing.
I suppose you could make the cooldown apply to the actual installed app. Like... when it's first installed it won't work for 24 hours and the clock doesn't start until you reboot. And then on boot it scares you again before starting the clock. And then "scares" you again after the cooldown.
I won't engage with that question as it's irrelevant. Scammers don't bother with apps 99% of the time. They much prefer threatening old people into wiring them money. Pretending that sideloaded scam apps are such an epidemic that it justifies this is so out of touch that my assumption is that you're a bot.
You didn't even slightly research the topic of phone malware, browse /r/isthisascam for starters.
I don't say the problem is an "epidemic" and it doesn't have to be an epidemic to be addressed.
It's very obviously not irrelevant. Google is not going to let their main phone app product become associated with Grandma losing her savings! That's not going to help the free software folks... it's going to send everyone over to iOS.
"Actually, you're secretly trying to destroy my phone."
"Okay, here's a solution that balances protecting unsophisticated users with accommodating power users."
"That's just FURTHER PROOF that you're secretly trying to destroy my phone."
You understand there's a real goal being pursued here, right? Suppose Google is dealing in good faith. Suppose 'solutions' that do not actually solve it, like 'just add a button with a warning label', or 'just don't accommodate them at all', are non-starters. How should they solve it differently? (They lay out all the reasoning in the article, so you can think through the same problems.)
If you think 'it's about control', ie that the product manager has some sort of fetish for disallowing you from doing what you want with the device you purchased, this is not more likely to be the unalloyed truth than 'they want what they say they want'. They have concrete goals, these goals do not include you being unable to install F-Droid because no rational human actively wants that, they do include protecting unsophisticated users from scams because every rational brand agent wants to keep users of their product from being scammed through it (and because governments are coercing them to), they communicate this goal to you at length, this could in an alternate universe incidentally hamstring your ability to install F-Droid, but they are bending over backwards to create new product flows for these ornery users so that they can get their F-Droid without impeding their real goal. To then conclude that this is further proof that it's about control? Find an Alex Jones transcript, ctrl-f for "it's about control", and understand that the people saying this are doing no truth-seeking that he is not. They do not have that goal, no ifs ands or buts about it. If they have another goal that incidentally causes loss of control, you get nowhere by treating that as their goal in the face of them compromising against it.
I proposed a hypothetical, I encourage thinking through it regardless of what you currently think Google is doing. (And if you were saying something slightly less inane than that, ctrl-f 'control' in the rest of the comments to see the issue.)
At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.
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.
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.
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.
What do you mean by impossible in this case? Can't you just have the coin-operated parking meters back? Where I live, in EU, parking meters even take cards.
EDIT: I guess "just" is doing some heavy-lifting, so I won't argue this further, but "impossible" isn't the word I would use either. The city could revert this decision, definitely if enough people wanted them to (that's... I know, the hardest part). I just agree with the OP that we technically could go back to slightly less-digital society.
Place where I park my car for work (Gosford, Australia) just got rid of cash payment, they now take card payment only (apparently there is also going to be an app, but they haven’t launched it yet). I think the number one reason is they are upgrading to a new system, and the parking technology vendor doesn’t provide cash payments as a standard option-probably they could implement a custom integration to enable it if they thought it was essential, but cash payments are so rare, it would be a difficult decision to justify. The carpark is owned and operated by the local government, so they need to justify their decisions, either as commercially viable, or else as producing substantial public benefit, but I think both arguments would be difficult to sustain in this case.
It’s kinda easy to justify though from a financial standpoint. If the parking meters take cash, you need all the hardware to accept and secure the cash. Then you need somebody to go around at some point and actually physically collect the cash. Then someone has to reconcile the cash, etc.
So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.
As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.
The other problem, in the US at least, is that cash is very low value (inflation), and dollar coins never caught on. I'm not trying to carry around $6 in quarters to park for 2 hours. And that's a pretty inexpensive parking spot.
And maintain them, which I suspect costs even more. Parking meters do fiddly work, out in all weather, where people hate them and do all kinds of vandalism.
It doesn't surprise me that they want to make hardware maintenance your problem.
There are places in EU too where parking meters have disappeared and payments are only done through apps. And I am talking about public space in the street, not private parkings.
I do believe that. Pointing out that I live in the EU was completely unnecessary, I meant that I live somewhere in the EU, I didn't really mean to compare it to the US.
>Regina city council made the decision to remove the coin option at downtown meters as part of the budget deliberation process, said Faisal Kalim, the City of Regina's director of community standards.
Yes, I read the linked article. Yes, the city made this decision. The decision could be reverted. I understand that this is a type of thing the OP (top-comment in the thread) is wishing for.
I don't see the "impossible" in my understanding of the linked article.
Coin-operated meters means someone have to come around checking the meter, collect coins, check the parking tickets. One person can only cover so many devices per day.
Then you have mechanical maintenance, with that comes disputes with "it was broken, it didn't accept the money" and so forth.
I've probably forgotten a number of other related things, but compare the above to digital solution.
Parking app, where the customer pays only for the parked time, no fiddling with money or keeping track of time. The parking attendant checks much quicker by just scanning the license plate while walking the rounds (could be done via car and a mounted camera even).
Analog just costs more, and citizens doesn't want taxes to go to things that are not strictly necessary.
It was possible for many decades already, budget and maintenance-wise. You can at least accept a credit card as an alternative. Yes, it's not perfect, but the fully digital alternatives also have drawbacks, as pointed by OP.
"The decision could be reverted." Do you often buy a new car and revert that purchase to purchase a different new car? I guess you don't often use your own money so no big deal.
Why the snark? Did I misread? I don't often buy a new car, do you? I really don't understand what your last sentence means.
I don't even think this a fair comparison, it's more like keeping the old car just in case or for other family members. But I think I specified enough what I'm arguing already, yes this is unlikely, just not impossible.
They are saying that things that have already been dumbed down can't go back. Obviously that's just their opinion, but I would guess that most people agree with them.
I'm reading this discussion, and allow me to give you my two cents. It's not a matter of being impossible, but rather how much the rest of society is willing to pay to maintain such infrastructure (either through higher taxes when dealing with the government, or through more expensive goods/services when dealing with corporations, since companies need to maintain old infrastructure that most people don't use).
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
This cuts both ways. Since smartphones are becoming such an essential necessity, we should neverever remove the possibility to adjust these devices for our own requirements
This has nothing to do with keeping people safe. If it did then power users could continue to install their own software by being given that ability as a developer setting. The fact that some people are gullible enough to go into a hidden setting on their phone and enable that in order to install an app from a random Chinese website is not a good reason to take away everyone's freedom. Consolidation of power is all this is about.
There is immense pressure to stop online scams which are draining old people of their life savings. The whole flow from the article seems entirely based around letting power users install what they want while being able to break the flow of a scammer guiding a clueless person in to installing malware.
It is promising that Google has avoided just turning off sideloading but still put measures in place to protect people.
> Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.
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.
There's quite a gap between this sort of opportunistic scamming that's happening all over the world and targeted multi-year campaigns that probably require the resources of a nation state.
One way to look at it: there are many open source projects targeting Android, projects that gain some sense of legitimacy over being open source yet have few (if any) eyes vetting them. Or, perhaps, the project is legitimate but people are getting third-party builds. That is what F-Droid does. That is what the developer of a third-party ROM does. It would not require the resources of a nation state to compromise them. I am not trying to cast a shadow on open source projects or F-Droid here. I am simply using them as an example because I use said software and am familiar with that ecosystem. The same goes for any software obtained outside of the Play Store, and it's likely worse since there is no transparency in those cases. Heck, the same goes for software obtained through the Play Store (but we're probably talking about nation state resources on that front).
Another way to look at it: we are only considering a specific avenue for exploitation here. If you close it off, the criminals will look for others. I would be surprised if they weren't looking for ways to bypass Google's checks. I would be surprised if they weren't looking for weaknesses in popular apps. Then there is social engineering. While convincing someone to install software is likely desirable, it certainly isn't the only approach.
Either way, I don't think Google's approach is solving the problem and I think it is going to do a huge amount of damage. Let's face it: major corporations aren't a paragon of goodness, yet Google's shift is handing them the market.
> targeted multi-year campaigns that probably require the resources of a nation state
Ha ha ha, "resources of a nation state"! One could run phishing campaigns at scale over many years without breaking the bank. This was true before LLMs, it's probably even cheaper now.
Sorry, I keep forgetting that LLMs are a thing. But I disagree because many people, especially tech-savvy people, can't possibly trust any communication that has the hallmarks of slop.
At this point it’s naive and perhaps a bit dangerous to assume that any of us can differentiate LLM from non-LLM text. I see less and less recognizable “slop” as time goes on, but I doubt the amount of content being generated has gone down.
I was always under the impression security was a red herring and the real reason was control. Google wants to own the device and rent it to users with revocable terms the same way SaaS subscription software works. Locking down what can run is a key step in that process
I worked at a bank on the backend for architecture and security.. and I've posted this attestation here before, but the sheer volume of fraud and fraud attempts in the whole network is astonishing. Our device fingerprinting and no-jailbreak-rules weren't even close to an attempt at control. It was defense, based on network volume and hard losses.
Should we ever suffer a significant loss of customer identity data and/or funds, that risk was considered an existential threat for our customers and our institution.
I'm not coming to Google's defense, but fraud is a big, heavy, violent force in critical infrastructure.
And our phones are a compelling surface area for attacks and identity thefts.
This 100%. I don't understand why everything needs to be an app nowadays. Some things are best done in person and without to technology. No, I won't install some shitty app that requests location and network access to order lunch. If a venue does not provide a paper menu and accept cash, they have just lost my custom.
Yeah, I worked at a bank once. I was told following policy and using dependencies with known vulnerabilities so my ass was covered was more important than actually making sure things were secure (it was someone else's problem to get that update through the layers of approval!). Needless to say, I didn't last long
I wish we had technical solutions that offered both. For example, a kernel like SeL4, which could directly run sandboxed applications, like banking apps. Apps run in this way could prove they are running in a sandbox.
Then also allow the kernel to run linux as a process, and run whatever you like there, however you want.
Its technically possible at the device level. The hard part seems to be UX. Do you show trusted and untrusted apps alongside one another? How do you teach users the difference?
My piano teacher was recently scammed. The attackers took all the money in her bank account. As far as I could tell, they did it by convincing her to install some android app on her phone and then grant that app accessibility permissions. That let the app remotely control other apps. They they simply swapped over to her banking app and transferred all the money out. Its tricky, because obviously we want 3rd party accessibility applications. But if those permissions allow applications to escape their sandbox, and its trouble.
(She contacted the bank and the police, and they managed to reverse the transactions and get her her money back. But she was a mess for a few days.)
> (She contacted the bank and the police, and they managed to reverse the transactions and get her her money back. But she was a mess for a few days.)
And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone (also, even if it were legal to do so, doing this regularly would create a lot of bad press for the bank). And they're unlikely to recover the losses from the actual scammers.
Fraud losses are something that banks track internally and attempt to minimize when possible and when it doesn't trade-off against other goals they have, such as maintaining regulatory compliance or costing more money than the fraud does. This means that banks - really, any regulated financial institution at all that has a smartphone app - have a financial incentive to encourage Apple and Google to build functionality into their mass-market smartphone OSs that locks them down and makes it harder for attackers to scam ordinary, unsophisticated customers in this way. They have zero incentive to lobby to make smartphone platforms more open. And there's a lot more technically-unsophisticated users like your piano teacher than there are free-software-enthusiasts who care about their smartphone OS provider not locking down the OS.
I think this is a bad thing, but then I'm personally a free-software-enthusiast, not a technically-unsophisticated smartphone user.
> And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone
In which country? This happened in Australia. The rules are almost certainly different from the US.
For me the answer is separate devices. I have an iphone which is locked down and secure. I have my banking and ID apps on it but I can't mod it however I want. Then I have a steam deck and raspberry pi I have entertainment and whatever I want on. I can customise anything. And if it gets hacked, nothing of importance is exposed.
> . For example, a kernel like SeL4, which could directly run sandboxed applications, like banking apps. Apps run in this way could prove they are running in a sandbox. ... Then also allow the kernel to run linux as a process, and run whatever you like there, however you want.
This won't work. It's turtles all the way down and it will just end up back where we are now.
More software will demand installation in the sandboxed enclave. Outside the enclave the owner of the device would be able to exert control over the software. The software makers don't want the device owners exerting control of the software (for 'security', or anti-copyright infringement, or preventing advertising avoidance). The end user is the adversary as much as the scammer, if not more.
The problem at the root of this is the "right" some (entitled) developers / companies believe they have to control how end users run "their" software on devices that belongs to the end users. If a developer wants that kind of control of the "experience" the software should run on a computer they own, simply using the end user's device as "dumb terminal".
Those economics aren't as good, though. They'd have to pay for all their compute / storage / bandwidth, versus just using the end user's. So much cheaper to treat other people's devices like they're your own.
It's the same "privatize gains, socialize losses" story that's at the root of so many problems.
It may still be an improvement over the situation now though. At least something like this would let you run arbitrary software on the device. That software just wouldn't have "root", since whatever you run would be running in a separate container from the OS and banking apps and things.
It would also allow 3rd party app stores, since a 3rd party app store app could be a sandboxed application itself, and then it could in turn pass privileges to any applications it launches.
Yes, sandboxing is a technological protection, but once you have important data flowing we often don't have technological protections to prevent exfiltration and abuse. The global nature of the internet means that someone who publishes an app which abuses user expectations (e.g. uses accessibility to provide command and control to attackers) is often out of legal reach.
You also have so much grey area where things aren't actual illegal, such as gathering a massive amount of information on adults in the US via third party cookies and ubiquitous third party javascript.
Thats why platforms created in the internet age are much more opinionated on what API they provide to apps, much more stringent on sandboxing, and try to push software installation onto app stores which can restrict apps based on business policy, to go beyond technological and legal limitations.
The problem is it's quite easy to poke holes in a sandbox when you're outside the sandbox looking in, especially when the user is granting you special permissions they don't understand. These apps aren't doing things like manipulating the heap of the banking app, they are instead just taking advantage of useful but powerful features like screen mirroring to read what the app is rendering.
What would happen to a normal person's phone when Google decided to revoke their Google account? Will the phone still function? Or is it "just" a matter of creating another Google account?
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.
When I point out that Apple listened to the Chinese government and removed apps that protestors were using to communicate during the Hong Kong protests, they seem to get it.
If you phrase it as "sideloading" then probably not, since it doesn't sound like something they might want to do, it also sounds difficult and technical. If you phrase it as installing your own software then it might garner some interest from the general populace, as who wouldn't want the option to install their desired software.
I don't think it follows that the entire population of each of those countries automatically cares about this just because it's, ostensibly, being done to enforce sanctions against them.
It sounds like you're not grasping the meaning of the linguistic construction being used by the person you're quoting. (Or you're being deliberately deceptive about your understanding of their intent. But it's probably just the former. I'm guessing you're ESL.)
"Ruining Android for everyone" ("to try to maybe help some") does not mean, "Android is now ruined for X, for all X." It means, perhaps confusingly, pretty much the opposite.
It means: "There exists some X for which Android is now ruined (because Google is trying to protect Y, for all Y)." (Yes, really. The way the other person phrased it is the right way way to phrase it—or, at least, it's a valid way to phrase it.)
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet.
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.
No, why should I? I'm not proposing to "change society to 15 years ago", my idea is more selective. It's more like "do a thorough review and restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional".
It seems pretty optional in the US at least. My phone has been broken for extended periods of time before. But different story trying to use budget European airlines like Wizz that require an app to get a boarding pass.
>"do a thorough review and restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional".
we should probably workshop ideas that are within reality.
downvoters are welcome to tell me how they would approach a worlwide review of everything that requires internet and un-internet it. i will wait.
some primer questions to get your brain turning: who organizes and conducts the review? who pays for the review? who pays for the implementations? whats the messaging and how do you convince people to go along with rethinking/re-implementing their entire already-working infrastructure that they have potentially spent millions to billions of dollars on? do you just dissolve all of the internet-only services, and tell the founders to suck it? who enforces it and how?
Consumer protection legislation would be a way to solve this:
If a business has more than X employees / does more than X amount of business per year / has more than X physical locations (pick one or more, make up some new criteria, tune to suit the needs of society) it must offer the same capabilities to interact with the business to those without smart phones as those with.
Small businesses wouldn't be radically impacted because they generally aren't "Internet only" anyway. The large business that are impacted have plenty of resources to handle compliance. If anything I'd argue it levels the playing field to an extent.
1) if you make it only applicable to smart phones, i just stop offering an uber smartphone app and now uber is website-only. if you apply it to "internet", as the original poster did, then:
2) companies like uber would be forced to shut down. you can say "cool, if they cant do it, their problem", which is fine, but a dozen of major issues pop up if something like 1/4 of the businesses currently propping up the stock market have to close doors or otherwise invest billions of dollars in phone centers or whatever they need.
it also raises questions about all sorts of businesses. another off the top of my head example: should 1password setup a call center where i can tell the operator what my new hackernews password is? is 1password exempt even if they have hundreds of employees and do millions per year? if yes, we have to come up with a bunch of murky criteria and definitions of what companies are exempt (across every industry, no less). which will, of course, cost a lot of time and money, just to surely be gamed. can we convince tax payers to foot that bill?
(this is also ignoring the approximately 0% chance that some sort of regulation of this sort gets pushed into law, against all of the extremely powerful tech lobbies. we dont even have ubiquitous right-to-repair!)
I'll fully admit that I'm "vibe commenting" here out of frustration with the direction society is going.
There won't ever be any consumer protection legislation like I suggested. I know that. It would make things better, but it'll never happen.
Things aren't going to get better for people who don't want to be forced to use new technology. (Eventually it'll be you being forced, too.)
I'm arguing, much in the way some techies bemoan removing malware from their parents' computer as an argument for why we shouldn't be allowed to use our mobile computers for what we want, for businesses to be required to offer ways of interacting to people who don't want to own smartphones. My argument isn't in the interests of powerful lobbies.
My wife and I have been helping her elderly aunt deal with a bank recently. I was shocked at the assumption her aunt would be able to receive SMS, use a smartphone with a camera to do "identity verification", etc. This lady has a flip phone, a land line, and no personal computer. Sure-- she could meet with someone at a branch to help her. Their first available meeting was a month away.
It's not going to get fixed. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares.
If we, the tech-savvy people, start pushing for it, it may have a chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if we take your defeatist approach, it's an absolute certainty that nothing will change.
> People who are unwilling to figure out the risks just should not use smartphones and the internet
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.
I “get” technology so I understand how you got here.
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.
You could torture the analogy more and say that this is more like saying "it is possible to make bad food and kill yourself at home, so we require everyone to go to a restaurant."
Well, I mean, do you know many houses burn down because someone fell asleep while frying a pork chop? We should just get rid of kitchens at home because it's just not safe.
Oil fires cause immense damage to property and life! I don’t know why stoves are allowed in homes at all. Worse yet, they don’t implement any age verification, so a child can just turn on the burner! It’s crazy!
Your analogy doesn't work here. Going to a restaurant is like using an app store. Installing apks is like cooking at home. Nothing stops you from cooking a meal that will get you sick.
Now imagine that every restaurant in your city is owned by one of two megacorporations and they really don't want you to have a microwave at home, let alone a stove. They expect that you will get all your food from them. This is where it's going with apps right now.
Because no amount of safeguards put up by the restaurant is going to protect you from getting sick of you decide to empty a bottle of bleach into your meal.
If you want to cook at home, there's no waiting list. There's no popup you have to confirm three times. You buy a stove, which likely lasts you half your life, a fridge, some dishes, pots, pans and so on.
I think it's fine to give people an easy mode. Not everyone cares about cooking (or tech). I just wish companies weren't trying to take the advanced features from the rest of us who do care.
I think it is different for some people because they are passionate and interested in tech.
I'd imagine someone who is passionate about cooking wouldn't be delighted if you cloudn't buy any ingredients in a store.
I see the value in precooked food and black-box working technology. But for me myself, as an enthusiast: I like being able to tinker and control my technology.
you expect a restaurant to be safe but there is no guarantee that it is. Many people have had food poisoning and I am sure some have died. It is obvious you don't "get" technology at all. You don't even "get" restaurants.
I fully agree. Similar to killing bacteria with antibiotics, Attempting to idiot-proof machinery only leads to the creation of idiot-proofing-resistant idiots.
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.
People themselves will decide. Same way they decided whether they wanted to buy a computer in the 00s. It's just that those who decide to not have internet banking should not be disadvantaged by the society compared to those who have it.
Agreed. Businesses should not be permitted to follow a "technology only" business model (which usually means lower costs for the business) to discriminate against potential Customers who might not want to use that technology.
Could the technophobes please just buy different smartphones? If certain people want to opt in to locked down devices, I think that's okay. But please give me a device that lets me do whatever I want. (And still lets me participate in modern society—I can't live with a Linux phone).
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.
You can do that, there are custom roms and open source phones. The problem is banks are legally obligated a lot of the time to pay out for fraud and scams. So in response they won't allow you to run their software unless they can verify the compute environment.
So why can I access my bank account just fine via the website on my phone, but shouldn't be able to do the same via the app? Can't they offer at least a PWA version of the website for custom ROM users?
People tend to distrust websites. URLs are also an immutable ledger that guarantees you’re in the right spot. The web is surprisingly robust for security.
What guarantees your banking app is the right one? A PNG and an app name with no security whatsoever.
But that doesn't guarantee anything? Even if the official banking app requires tons of verification, that doesn't prevent me from modding their banking app and redistributing the modded version to up to 20 people.
We already have that. The market for the "technophobe" (e.g. above average and below levels of security awareness) phone is 100x larger.
That means the people who say "I can evaluate the intricacies and impacts of software authorization" have significantly fewer speciality devices to pick from, and those devices may not be worth developers (or regulators) making carve-outs to support.
'Only the educated elite should be permitted to use technology' is a great take, but unfortunately the peons outvote and outspend you, so their opinions matter more than yours.
> to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people
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.
Android has about 2/3 worldwide market share and it hasn't had anything like this before. Many people, myself included, chose it exactly because it allows the installation of modded, pirated, or otherwise non-store-worthy apps.
The 2/3 marketshare must be almost entirely due to Android being cheap and accessible, not because those people need to install arbitrary software. A lot of mobile plans don't even give you GB/mo, they give WhatsApp messages/mo.
There two main mobile OS in the space, one moron-proof but limited, the other a bit more permissive, but slightly less secure for it.
The problem is that most apps target only those two, and the second is trying to moron-proof, loosing most of it value to part of its users, while the apps are still locked in.
I like this idea. But last time I tried it the customer representative on the other line told me they were sorry but they could not accommodate my request at this time.
> At this point I'm convinced that there's something deeply wrong with how our society treats technology.
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)
If you think about it for as long as I did, you will find that the moment everything went sideways is when general-purpose computing devices started having their initial bootloader in the mask ROM of the CPU/SoC. Outlaw just that, say, by requiring the first instruction the CPU executes to physically reside in a separate ROM/flash chip, and suddenly, everything is super hackable. But DMCA abolition would certainly be very helpful as well.
Smartphones and the internet are really useful and convenient. Even if we could make it work, it seems quite rude to say that people should be excluded from it because we can't be bothered to make it safe.
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.
Some people don't want to be taught about some things because they don't care enough about them. I was told a story as a kid about a grandma that didn't want to learn to read and write. It's the same thing here — there are people who don't want a smartphone. They were just fine with an old cell phone that could only call and text, but then the society forced them to buy a smartphone, so they did, but they still don't really want it. It's still a burden to them. It still creates more problems for them than it solves. I know several people like that.
Is this even the reason? If Android phonemakers are simply concerned about tech-illiterate users switching to iPhone, they could sell a locked-down Android phone that requires some know-how to unlock.
Your mistake is taking Google's argument at face value. Protecting users is an outright lie, this is purely about control.
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.
I'm assuming good faith and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
Of course it might be that they want more control. In addition to controlling the world's most popular web browser and the world's most popular search engine and the world's most popular online advertising network and the world's most popular online video service.
It's really hard to when there's already technical solutions. They could require a process like bootloader unlocking that puts it in "dev" mode for instance
While signing is useful, leaving no escape hatch imo is blatantly predatory
These restrictions already don't apply to something you install over adb, so there's already that. But that still considerably raises the bar for things like apps made by sanctioned entities, for example, most Russian banks.
It's all part of the war on general computing. This dystopian nightmare is coming to desktop operating systems too. See the age verification stuff that's all of a sudden being pushed hard by countries all over the world.
As someone that was going to switch from iPhone to Android/Pixel later this year, at least now I know not to bother anymore, as the locking down of Android won't stop here.
It's crazy to me how technical people willfully disregard the coming end of individually-owned general purpose computers. I have a strange mix of nostalgia and crushing sadness knowing that I got to live through that time.
Illegal would by a hyperbole. But the noose is tightening a bit.
There are upcoming limits for cash transactions (10K, countries can opt to go lower), and strong requirements for identity verification at 3K or more euros in cash.
Also illegal in Denmark. You need a NemKonto by law. Also making cash payments over 15000 is illegal since 2024.
So you can't make a large purchase without a bank transfer.
Not illegal per se in Germany but you won't find a legal job that doesn't require you to have a bank account. Benefits will also only be paid electronically (exceptions for some asylum seekers apply).
You also cannot get a tax refund or pay taxes without a bank account.
Not sure how it works in countries that didn't go through 80 years of socialism, but I assume that you're saying that in those countries, your salary is required to go to your bank account and can't be paid in cash. Then you can still pretty much "stick to cash" by withdrawing the whole thing on your payday. But then idk, maybe everyone in those countries is aware of the risks related to keeping their money in a bank, it's just the internet banking that introduces the new ones for them.
> Ruining Android for everyone to try to maybe help some rather technologically-hopeless groups of people is the wrong solution.
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.
What's then left as Google's advantage? I'm really not interested in buying myself a cage, but if Google will make me choose between two cages then Apple has nicer one.
We used to live in that world! Until the 1970s in the US, you actually couldn't take on debt or get a credit card if you had no way to repay it. But liberals pushed for a new law that made it so anybody could access credit and when you open up systems to everyone then the quality goes down dramatically.
We basically do this with everything. Unix is a great operating system, but the Mac version, made for morons, is practically unusable it's so dumbed down.
No, you have that backwards. A society is judged by how it treats its least able members. Android devices are primarily for mainstream users, not us. Technically adept users are the minority and we can deal with a few hoops to customize our phones the way we like.
It's selfish to advocate against better protections for the least able people in the world just for our own convenience.
This is going to hurt legitimate sideloading way more than actually necessary to reduce scams:
- 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.).
>- 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?
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.
> 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.
Ok, but why is this advertised to applications in the first place? It's quite literally none of their business that developer options are enabled and it's a constant source of pain when some government / banking apps think they're being more "secure" by disallowing this.
> ADB installs are not impacted by the waiting period, so that is an option if you need to install certain unregistered applications immediately.
Someone is just going to make a nice GUI application for sideloading apks with a single drag-and-drop, so if your idea is that ADB is a way to ensure only "users who know what they're doing" are gonna sideload, you've done nothing. This is all security theatre.
The scammers don't even need to make a GUI, they just need to get you to enable adb-over-tcp and bridge that to their network somehow - an ssh client app would do the trick.
How many people do you suspect are gullible enough to fall for these scammers but also competent enough to install an SSH client and enable port-forwarding for an ADB proxy? Like fifteen people worldwide?
How many people are gullible enough right now to plug a phone to a laptop over USB and execute an exe on an operating system with no sandboxing at all? ADB even seems to work over webusb. (at that point you may as well give up on hacking the phone, but I digress). That's exactly why I believe the problem is more complicated and why Google's solution is not really fixing anything, not for the users.
If you mean things like Shizuku or local adb connection through Termux, it's quite an awkward process to set up even for someone like me who's been building Android apps since 2011. Like, you can do if you really really need it, but most people won't bother. You have to do it again after every reboot, too.
People who want your money always want to have really great UX. I remember how painless buying lottery tickets online was, it was the smoothest checkout experience in all of online shopping I have ever done.
I don't think Google should be changing Android this way at all, and fear that it will later be used for evil. That said, I thought of an improvement:
Allow a toggle with no waiting period during initial device setup. The user is almost certainly not being guided by a scammer when they're first setting up their device, so this addresses the concern Google claims is driving the verification requirement. I'll be pretty angry if I have to wait a day to install F-Droid and finish setting up a new phone.
Evil, for the record would mean blocking developers of things that do not act against the user's wishes, but might offend governments or interfere with Google's business model, like the article's example of an alternative YouTube client that bypasses Google’s ads. Youtube is within its rights to try to block such clients, but preventing my device from installing them when that's what I want to do is itself a malicious act.
The only reason I run android over iOS is the freedom to install things I want on it. A waiting period is unacceptable as Android has proven that it can't be trusted not to tighten the grip further.
Why do you keep harping on about ADB installs. That's not helpful. It doesn't help me install open source apps from FDroid. It's ridiculous that you think booting up a computer and using ADB is a reasonable workaround. It isn't.
So give me a way to completely disable this nonsense via ADB.
This is hot garbage. Eliminating third party app stores like F-Droid defeats the whole purpose many of us even bother running Android instead of locked down Apple stuff.
Do I need to be signed in to Google play to get the sideloading exception turned on? I don't sign in to it because I don't want to have my phone associated with a Google account. But I can't uninstall play completely on the devices I have.
It says something about 'restart your phone and reauthenticate' that's why I'm asking. What do you autenticate?
> ADB installs are not impacted by the waiting period, so that is an option if you need to install certain unregistered applications immediately.
Um yeah but then do I have to install every update via adb? I want to just use F-Droid.
>It says something about 'restart your phone and reauthenticate' that's why I'm asking. What do you autenticate?
You're authenticating that you're the device owner (via your device's saved biometrics or PIN/pattern/password).
>Um yeah but then do I have to install every update via adb? I want to just use F-Droid.
No, once you go through the advanced flow and choose the option to allow installing unregistered apps indefinitely, you can both install and update unregistered apps without going through the flow again (or using ADB).
So... we're just going to move the scam into convincing the end user to run an application on their PC to ADB sideload the Scam App. Got it, simple enough. It's not hard to coach a user into clicking the "no, I'm not being coached" button, too, to guide them towards the ADB enable flow.
I think this is a "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good thing". It's technically possible to get around, but adding more speed bumps in the way of scammers tends to drastically reduce the number of people who get scammed.
> - 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?
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.
Philippines' most popular e-wallet app GCash outright closes when the developer mode is enabled with the popup saying that the device has "settings [enabled] that are not secure".
I can use Wero just fine in my banking app. Can't try the app that's called Wero in the Play store because it just directs me to my banking app. But I can open it at least ...
The one-day waiting period is so arbitrary. Have they demonstrated any supporting data? We know google loves to flaunt data.
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.
Brother, there's an entire genre of scamming where the scammers spend months building rapport with their victims, usually without ever asking for anything, before "cashing out". One day is nothing.
Wouldn't a wait time like 2 hours with some jitter make it more difficult for a scammer to pursue the case? People aren't going to be willing to stay on the phone for hours at a time. With 24 hour wait, the scammer could just schedule another call for the next day.
I think the more important aspect is that people will have 24h to slow down, think, and realize that they are being scammed. Urgency and pressure is one of the top tactics used by scammers.
Scammers will definitely call back the next day to continue. But it is quite possible that by then the victim has realized, or talked to someone who helped them realize that they are being scammed.
There's been some reporting recently where I live about a case of some woman being scammed.
She went to a bank to transfer the scammer money. They told her no. She came back the next day. The police got involved and explained everything to her. Then she came back the next day. After that, she apparently found another location which let her transfer the money.
There's basically zero chance a 24 hour (or any amount of a) cool off period will help these people.
It's not one example. The scammers purposefully target people like these. That's their business.
Like, I'm sure there's a small amount of people who normally wouldn't get scammed but fall for it in a panic. But, is that really such a big concern for Google that they absolutely must continue stripping user freedoms from us? Is the current 30s popup which needs 3 confirmations not enough? Will the new one really work?
This is obvious to anyone with a brain. I'm not familiar with scam logistics or the videos you mentioned, and the exact same line you put in quotes is what first came to my mind.
tl;dr of this post is that Google wants to lock down Android and be its gatekeeper. Every other point of discussion is just a distraction.
Right, this friction makes it much harder for a scammer to get away with saying something like, "wire me $10,000 right now or you won't see your child ever again!" as the potential victim is forced to wait 24 hours before they can install the scammer's malicious app, thus giving them time to think about it and/or call their trusted contacts.
The sheer arrogance that you think someone manipulated successfully will just re-think the situation and ask their friends/family. The naivety to assume all scammers are impulsive fools and don't do this for a living, as their primary line of work.
So Google's going to add some nonsense abstraction layer and when this fails to curb the problem after a 24 hour wait, it will be extended more maybe a week, and more information must be collected to release it. We all know how this goes.
Sure, but what about a 30 minute delay? 1 hour? 2 hour?
24 is just so long.
But also, my expectation is that a scammer is going to just automate the flow here anyways. Cool, you hit the "24 hour" wait period, I'll call you back tomorrow, the next day, or the next day and continue the scam process.
It might stop some less sophisticated spammers for a little bit, but I expect that it'll just be a few tweaks to make it work again.
24 hours is long enough to get them off the phone, and potentially talking to other people who might recognize the scam.
There will be some proportion of people who mention to their spouse/child/friend about how Google called them to fix their phone, and are saved by that waiting period.
Sure, but wouldn't 35 hours do the same trick? Or 5 hours? Or 10 hours and 28 minutes? :)
The question is, why exactly 24 hours? The argument is that the time limit is set to protect the users and sacrifice usability to do so. So it would be prudent to set the time limit to the shortest amount that will protect the user -> and that shortest amount is apparently 24 hours, which is rather.. suspiciously long and round :)
Well, I guess 24 hours gives a good change to include at least one window where a vulnerable person might be able to speak with a trusted contact.
Someone who lives in another timezone or works weird hours etc. Our routines generally repeat on 24hour schedules, so likely to be one point of overlap.
You've got to pick some time value (if you choose this route at all), and if the goal is to prevent urgency-coercion it needs to be at least multiple hours. An extremely-common-for-humans one seems rather obvious compared to, like, 18.2 hours (65,536 seconds).
Unless you want to pick 1 week. But that's a lot more annoying.
Have you ever watched Kitboga? Scammers call people back all the time. They keep spreadsheets of their marks like a CRM. It takes time to build trust and victimize someone, and these scammers are very patient.
It sounds like the 24 hour advanced flow should be completely removed then to protect these people. Right? It can't be perfect so to follow you, it should not exist.
> This is going to hurt legitimate sideloading way more than actually necessary to reduce scams
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.
You have to wait one day only once, when enabling the feature. I agree that enabling developer mode could be a problem but mostly because it's buried below screens and multiple touches. As a data point, I enabled developer mode on all my devices since 2011 and no banking app complained about it. But it could depend by the different banking systems of our countries.
They don't operate in my county AFAIK. However that reinforces my idea that the endgame will be a pristine Android phone in a drawer at home with the banking apps required for accessing their sites with 2FA and another phone in my pocket for daily use.
their goal is to make software installation as painful as possible without being outright impossible : ‘sideloading’ is only ever a euphemism for ‘illegitimate’.
We'll see when this rolls out, but I don't foresee the package manager checking for developer mode when launching "unverified" apps, just when installing them. AFAICT the verification service is only queried on install currently.
Googler here (community engagement for Android) - I looked into the developer options question, and 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.
If I understand correctly, the F-Droid store itself would be possible to install without waiting period, as it's an app from a verified developer.
Would apps installed from F-Droid be subject to this process, or would they also be exempt? Could that be a solution that makes everyone happy? Android already tracks which app store an app originates from re: autoupdating.
Yes, it is really dumb that some of these settings are exposed to all apps with no permission gating [0]. But it will likely always be possible to fingerprint based on enabled developer options because there are preferences which can only be enabled via the developer options UI and (arguably) need to be visible to apps.
What might help better is having permissions that you can set separate settings that can be read for different apps (including the possibility to return errors instead of the actual values), even if they can be read by default you can also change them per apps. (This has other benefits as well, including possibility of some settings not working properly due to a bug, you can then work around it.)
Because estimates suggest Americans lose about $119 billion annually to financial scams, which is a not insignificant fraction of our entire military budget, or more than 5% of annual social security expenditures.
What do scams have to do with having developer options enabled?
This isn't a rhetorical question. There's no big red warning on the developer options screen saying it's dangerous. I haven't heard about real-world attacks leveraging developer settings. I suppose granting USB debug to an infected PC is dangerous, but if you're in that situation, you're already pwned.
Banks do these things to check security boxes, not to prevent scams.
In this case, they don't want users to reverse-engineer their app or look at logs that might inadvertently leak information about how to reverse-engineer their app. It is pointless, I know, but some security consultant has created a checkbox which must be checked at all costs.
Nobody reads disclaimers, and people who get scammed and lose their life savings won't be made whole by being told "you accepted the disclaimer, nothing we can do."
Most of the victims were last in school in the 1960s when all this stuff didn't exist. Also from experience teaching people with dementia or memory issues is kinda challenging as they just forget.
I wonder if you might be relying on a stereotype of victims. Here's some recent data: "The 2024 FTC Consumer Sentinel Network reported that 44% of all 20-somethings claimed losses in 2023". More data here: https://www.synovus.com/personal/resource-center/fraud-preve...
I don't know. I've been silently outraged and disappointed by this whole forbidding of unverified apps, but also hopeful it wouldn't affect me much as a user of grapheneos.
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.
As described developer mode is only required at install time. Remains to be seen in the actual implementation, but as described in the post developer mode can be switched off after apps have been side loaded.
> some apps (e.g., banking apps) will refuse to operate and such when developer mode is on
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.
Welp, I guess my current Android phone will be my last one.
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.
If it helps, the 24-hour wait is a one-time process. You do it once, click the toggle to allow installing unregistered apps indefinitely, and then install whatever you want. You can even turn off developer options afterwards, per my understanding, and it won't impact your ability to install unregistered apps.
That does not help. That is a fundamentally fucking insane limitation that will completely destroy any developer's ability to develop without getting approval from Google. Regardless of my feelings of the annoyance of going through this process myself, 90% of users simply will not go through this process to install apps, killing any potential userbase. Google has no goddamn right to be the sole dictator of who is allowed to develop software for the largest platform in the world, to decide who is allowed to have a career in mobile software development and who is not, and you should be utterly ashamed of yourself for accepting a paycheck to defend this. I hope your shitty company and Apple both get their comeuppance in court for these monopolistic practices, and may we some day get a future where anyone is free to develop software without approval of a central police corp.
Probably f droid will become an official app store recognized by Google, and then you won't have to go through this flow to install f droid or its apps.
The forced ID for developers outside the Play store is already killing open source projects you could get on F-Droid. The EU really needs to identify this platform gatekeeping as a threat. As an EU citizen I should not be forced to give government ID to a US company, which can blacklist me without recourse, in order to share apps with other EU citizens on devices we own.
The DSA covers App stores with a large numbers of users - this is about allowing users side load unsigned apps. Afaik there is no requirement to identify the developers of applications that can be installed on a vendors platform (outside the app store). Otherwise Microsoft would require Government ID to compile and email someone an EXE.
Death, taxes and escalating safety are the only certainities in this tech dominated world. So, be ready for more safety in the next round few months/years down the line. Eventually Android will become as secure as ios. We need a third alternative before that day comes.
It's not a win by any means. I hope that we don't stop making noise.
I believe that is why "escalating safety" and "secure" were written in italics in the comment. Those are the terms Google would use, not necessarily the truth.
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.
Google serves ads with known scams and nothing seems done about it.
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).
> I remember when Google disabled call recording in Android, so you no longer could record scammers.
Citation needed. My Pixel 7a with the latest updates has settings for call recording in the phone app. Since I never screwed around with it, I'd assume these are the defaults:
Call recording is turned on, with "asks to record calls" set
Automatically delete recordings is "never"
Automatically record calls with non-contacts is off
No specific numbers to automatically record calls are set
There is also a note that you have to agree to their ToS to use it, and I'd also suggest being careful if you live in a jurisdiction that requires two-party consent for recording.
In any case, I'm of the opinion that if F-Droid goes, I'm basically going to treat this as a feature phone and stay away from third-party apps in general aside from "musts" like banking.
I'm generally OK with this, but the 24 hour hang time does seem a bit onerous.
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.
The apps might not be available though. Many developers are simply stopping in the face of Google's invasive policies. I don't blame them. Say goodbye to useful apps like Newpipe.
A few apps have been showing pop-ups warning users in advance that they are not going to do the verification. Obtanium is definitely on of them. I think I saw something similar on NewPipe.
It says they will not comply with whatever registration is required. It does not say specifically what they will do, in part I assume because they had not been given enough specifics (for example if it remains possible to sideload but not to be in a third party app store, would they continue to develop with that diminished accessibility?). Additionally YouTube itself has been making some system changes that, outside NewPipe's control, may make it functionally impossible to use the service without being logged into a Google account, so they may be suggesting that they think the writing is on the wall for them.
This is hopefully an exciting time to consider a Motorola device, since they are partnering with GrapheneOS, but I worry that Google will block Google Play Services on any device that doesn't comply, so this might actually be a demoralizing time to be a GrapheneOS fan, when we watch them worm their stupid walled garden nonsense into the Motorola version of it.
You don't need Google Play at all on GrapheneOS. You have to option of installing a sandboxed version of Google Play, but it isn't installed by default. Google's verification shenanigans are otherwise irrelevant to Graphene, it only applies to apps distributed through the Google store.
The vast majority of apks work just fine without Google libraries. In some rare cases, things such as notifications that depend on Google's servers may not work if the developers haven't not implemented an alternative backend such as a direct connection.
This 24-hour wait time nonsense is a humiliation ritual designed to invalidate any expectation of Android being an open platform. The messaging is very clear and the writing's on the wall now, there's nowhere to go from here but down.
Find the email address of the CEO/board members. When you get this on your device. Let your thoughts be known to them with a screenshot. Feel free to use language that will make them feel dumb and sad. Don't expect them to understand logical arguments or pleas.
Companies get away from this because they distance themselves from their customers and they have systems to hide feedback.
In addition to a enabling it in this onerous way, this should be a thing you can set when you first set up the phone after factory default: "I am technologically literate and I accept the risks of side loading indefinitely." If it's set once during set up then none of the vulnerable people will have it set for the lifetime of their phone. A scammer would have to factory reset their phone which would defeat the purpose of gaining access.
As an idea, what about allowing the 24 hours to be bypassed using adb (edit: bypass to allow indefinitely, not just install a single app)?
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.
Right, if this is being built into AOSP I dont see how they wouldn't add an adb command to immediately skip the "Advanced Flow" wait. if it's safe to let uses run "adb install", then "adb skip-advanced-flow" should be just as safe to do too.
I'm surprised but happy to see you and so many others here saying this. In recent years it seemed like this 'hacker' community was all about Apple devices, but now that Google is going partway in the same direction, people aren't all just taking it.
Do you think there's two groups, and the people that cared simply went with Android and so there was never this outcry about installing free software on iOS, or that this will last only as long as the change still feels recent and like a new restriction?
24 hour mandatory wait time to side load!? All apps I want to use on my phone are not in the Play Store. So I buy a new phone (or wipe a used phone) and then I can’t even use it for 24 hours?
1) The one-time, one-day waiting period only applies if you go through the advanced flow to allow installing unregistered apps. You can still install registered apps (ie. apps made by developers who have verified their identity) even if they're distributed outside the Play Store.
2) You can use ADB to immediately install unregistered apps. ADB installs are not subject to the waiting period.
So let's say I'm F-Droid, an organization making a direct competitor to the Google Play Store and openly pointing out how much scammy shit is available in that store. My options are 1) submit my identity to Google (my competitor) so they can identify me and choose to revoke that verification at any point, or 2) I can tell all my users that they must go through these scary dialogs AND wait 1 day before they can use my competing product? That's cool, glad we've got the options laid out in front of us.
I forgot 3) instruct my users how to use ADB from another computer to install my competing app. Awesome.
You'd think regulators should make Google ship a 'Choose my store(s)' screen at setup, but Google thinks the opposite is the case and Google should also be able to control app distribution outside of the Playstore.
Developers who distribute Android apps on other app stores are not strictly required to undergo verification and thus can remain anonymous, but if they choose not to, then later this year (when the enforcement of verification goes active) their apps can only be installed on certified Android devices via ADB and/or the new advanced flow.
Thus, you can still install unregistered apps if they're distributed via F-Droid or other sources, but to do so, you will need to use ADB and/or go through the new advanced flow. And remember, the new advanced flow is a one-time process - once you go through with it, you can allow your device to install unregistered apps indefinitely!
Yeah, it's terrible. I buy a new phone and then can't effectively use it for 24 hours? Half my apps are downloaded from F-Droid, which I've used for over a decade. Just gives me another reason why I'm very happy to have recently moved over to GrapheneOS.
From purely a usability standpoint, not a freedom standpoint, I would actually be okay with that for my personal use if it stayed like that. But the point is that they're just making it worse and worse. They won't stop with this. I can arrange to do without an important app for a day, even if I had to get a new phone unexpectedly (If I had to skip attending an event and stay at home where my computer is, because I could only properly be on call with my sideloaded app, I'd chalk it up to an unusual situation). But it won't be long before they change it again.
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...
Scammers will just start the process and call back the next day. There is an entire genre of scam relying on slowly building rapport and only cashing in once all the way at the end.
I switched to iOS in anticipation of this change. The reality is, if they are thinking about doing this, it's only a matter of time before they do it. If I have to choose between two walled gardens, apple will win every time.
A lot of people here are looking for compromises. Any compromise on this means giving ground to Google's monopoly and the war on open computing and ultimately freedom.
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.
The 24 hour wait period is the largest of the annoyances in this list, but given that adb installs still work, I think this is a list of things I can ultimately live with.
> In addition to the advanced flow we’re building free, limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists. This allows you to share apps with a small group (up to 20 devices) without needing to provide a government-issued ID or pay a registration fee.
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.
I mean, I'm happy to be conspiratorial about it too, I give Google no benefit of the doubt, but outside of Play Protect I don't think they explicitly say "your phone is telling us every app you install." This new feature is them making that explicit.
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.
I'd rather not have to go through this ritual, but I appreciate that there is a genuine security problem that google are trying to address. I also suspect that they have other motivations bound-up in this - principally discouraging use of alternative app stores. But basically I could live with this process.
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.
I don't think developers targeting alternative app stores would care much about having to perform verified developer registration. Particularly apps that are available in both Play Store and alternative app stores.
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").
I'm not in agreement with most of you, hn. They've found a decent compromise that works for power users and the general population. Your status as a power user does not invalidate the need to help the more vulnerable.
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.
Why would I pay Google after this? I have gotten rid of Xiaomi a long time ago.
For now, I am rolling with my OnePlus 7 with LineageOS, till I find a phone that's not completely locked down. Yes, it's old, but it gets my job done. Once I am off all of Google's services, I'll probably get rid of Google in most part of my life.
As, someone who is a user from invite only Gmail, it's difficult, but necessary.
So like a Motorola, Sony, Fairphone, Shiftphone, Jolla... none of these are 'completely locked down' (though besides Jolla, they're all a little: they don't come as "yours" by default because of the contract with Google to be allowed to ship Play/Maps/etc.)
This helping the vulnerable framing is naive at best. This is about an American ad company consolidating their power over what people can do with devices they bought and are reliant on daily.
Helping the vulnerable should not involve that. If your only idea on how to help the vulnerable involves that, think of better ideas.
At some point we need to start wondering if it's not just naivete but intellectual dishonesty. The same American corporations that claim to be imposing draconian control measures to "protect the vulnerable" are, at the same time, exploiting those very same vulnerable people to the best of their ability. Take Google, they have no problem showing ads for scams in Youtube and Google Ads. There is mounting evidence that their recommendation algorithms for Youtube, shorts, etc. negatively affect mental health, especially youngest ones. But it makes them money, and they've zero interest in preventing that or changing it.
And it's not just Google, it's the m.o. of all large corporations. Another example is Epic Games, they advertise how they will fight in court against big companies like Google and Apple to defend their users. Yet they've gotten fined repeatedly for amounts in the millions, for predatory micro-transactions, and misleading minors into spending money without the consent of their parents.
Time and time again it is proven that everything these companies do, it's always for the benefit of their bottom line, and consideration for their users does not even factor into their considerations. This is no different, they want to push it because it will give them more control or make them money, and it either won't protect anyone, or that's just an unintended side effect but a good way to market it.
My personal hard line is having to ask Google for permission to sideload. Even if it's free and no personal info is exchanged.
This new process is annoying but I can see it helping prevent scams.
Scammers can coerce people into ignoring warnings if they convince them their entire life savings are on the line. It's hard to do if you need to wait 24 hours before the setting unlocks.
>And what is malware? For [Android Ecosystem President], malware in the context of developer verification is an application package that “causes harm to the user’s device or personal data that the user did not intend.”
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.
Hmm, as long as the waiting period is not per-app then maybe this is OK. Especially now that there is a well supported way to distribute alternative app stores without going through the sideloading process.
The secret reason they are doing this is because governments want to be able to identify everyone online everywhere it matters at all time. They want to strip anonymity from computing.
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.
Do you need a Google account to opt out of the restriction? It says something about authenticating.
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.
Every non-stock app on my phone was installed from an APK directly downloaded from the manufacturer or open source developer's site / Github releases. I've never had a Google Play account and have never used any Android "app store".
I switched from iOS to Android about three years ago. I saved all the APKs for everything I installed (or updated). When I got a new phone last fall it was pleasantly like geting a new PC. I imported my SMS and contacts from my last backup, then installed all the apps I use and imported or manually set any settings I wanted to customize.
The biggest pain was having to manually logon the couple of sites I allow to keep persistent cookies since device owners aren't allowed to just import/export cookies from mobile Chrome.
F-Droid. And also by Google's definition, everything I install from F-Droid. So Antennapod (Podcasts), ConnectBot, DAVx (sync my Fastmail calendar to my phone), Etar (Calendar app), Jellyfin (media player), Jiten (JP dictionary), KOReader (ebook reader), OsmAnd~ (Maps), VLC.
Meanwhile from the Play Store I have Bitwarden, Firefox, 2 banking apps, a few airline apps, Wireguard and Whatsapp. So I actually have more from F-Droid than the Play Store from what I regularly use.
Why not grab Fennec from f-droid as well? It used to also have more features, I'm not sure if that's still the case but might as well go with the open source build
I sideload no apps. I install most apps from either F-Droid main, or an other repo.
> Why those apps are not in a store?
All of them are in a repository. Just only the state sponsored ID-app is only available via the ad-infected Google RAT delivery service, also known as Google Play.
Would Obtainium continue to work? I like the freedom of entrusting developers I know and installing APKs from repositories instead of restricting myself to app stores whose publishers have to be identified and approved by an advertising company.
Reminder that when you use terminology like "sideloading" you're accepting the premise that there's something inherently dodgy about installing your software onto your operating system.
Nothing screams being infantilised by your platform more than having to wait 24 hours to be allowed to install software on your own purchased computing devices.
The alleged inability of a company like Google to create an operating system that makes banking apps secure while allowing users to install whatever they like is very implausible. Android apps are already sandboxed and have fine-grained access control, and the operating system controls everything that is painted on the screen.
The security justification for this measure is not credible.
I'd urge everyone here to seriously consider switching to GrapheneOS. It's a far simpler transition than e.g. switching from Windows or OSX to Linux, and many people find that it has basically no friction vs android.
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).
Honestly, if coerced sideloading is a real attack vector, then this seems to be a pretty fair compromise.
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.
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.
I don't think Google has a strategy around what should be easy for users to do. PWAs still lack native capabilities and are obviously shortcuts to Chrome, and Google pushes developers to Trusted Web Activities which need to be published on the Play Store or sideloaded.
But these developer verification policies don't make any exceptions for permission-light apps, nor do they make it harder to sideload apps which request dangerous permissions, they just identify developers. I also suspect that making developer verification dependent on app manifest permissions opens up a bypass, as the package manager would need to check both on each update instead of just on first install.
Yep, I have a legitimate use case for exactly this. It integrates directly with my application and gives it native phone capabilities that are unavailable if I were to use a VoIP provider of any kind.
As a legitimate developer developing an app with the power to take over the phone, I think it's appropriate to ask you to verify your identity. It should be an affordable one-time verification process.
This should not be required for apps that do HTTPS requests and store app-local data, like 99%+ of all apps, including 99% of F-Droid apps.
But, in my opinion, the benefit of anonymity to you is much smaller than the harm of anonymous malware authors coaching/coercing users to install phone-takeover apps.
(I'm sure you and I won't agree about this; I bet you have a principled stand that you should be able to anonymously distribute malware phone-takeover apps because "I own my device," and so everyone must be vulnerable to being coerced to install malware under that ethical principle. It's a reasonable stance, but I don't share it, and I don't think most people share it.)
I think you read a bit too much into my message. I agree, it's complicated, I don't want my parents and grandparents easily getting scammed.
But yes they are my devices, and I should be able to do exactly what I want with them. If I'm forced to deal with other developers incredibly shitty decisions around how they treat VoIP numbers, guess who's going to have a stack of phones with cheap plans in the office instead of paying a VoIP provider...
But no, I have no interest in actually distributing software like that further than than the phones sitting in my office.
For a security-sensitive permission like intercepting texts and calls, I'm not sure it makes sense for that to be anonymous at all, not even for local development, not even for students/hobbyists.
Getting someone to verify their identity before they have the permission to completely takeover my phone feels pretty reasonable to me. It should be a cheap, one-time process to verify your identity and develop an app with that much power.
I can already hear the reply, "What a slippery slope! First Google will make you verify identity for complete phone takeovers, but soon enough they'll try to verify developer identity for all apps."
But if I'm forced to choose between "any malware author can anonymously intercept texts and calls" or "only identified developers can do that, and maybe someday Google will go too far with it," I'm definitely picking the latter.
The scam only has to work on a tiny slice of users, and the people who fall for fake bank alerts or package texts will march through a pile of Android warnigns if the script is convincing enough. Once the operator gets them onto a PC, the whole thing gets easier because ADB turns it into a guided install instead of a phone-only sideload.
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.
> Honestly, if coerced sideloading is a real attack vector, [...]
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."
This is the thing that bothers me the most about this. It is as if even the HN crowd is taking it as given that malware is this big problem for banking on Android but in reality there seems to be very little evidence to back this up. I regularly read local (Finnish) news stories about scams and they always seem to be about purely social engineering via whatsapp or the scammer calling their number and convincing the victim they are a banking official or police etc.
That's why I'm inclined to believe Google is just using safety as an excuse to further leverage their monopoly.
Some years ago had a scam call about my "router connection error logs" and "I needed" to install TeamViewer from the PlayStore... So can't imagine what is this going stop
I get that its pretty clear with the straight sideloading case, but can anyone say for sure what this will look like for an f-droid user? Its hard to keep track but I thought something new here because of EU is that alternative app stores != sideloading? Something where app stores could choose themselves to get "verified," whatever that means, to become a trusted vendor? Or is this completely wrong?
From my read, it's explicitly a one-time thing. Presumably that means that even if you pick the "allow for 7 days" option, you can re-enable it after that without a delay (maybe with a reboot?).
> 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.”
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.
Is this in AOSP? I was assuming the changes are to GMS. I should hope that no distributor of AOSP(-based) images include this code anyway so it's just on the google devices
I am not happy about this, but as long as advanced Android users can still turn this off and keep it off, we're still in a better place than iOS.
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.
Meh. I get the annoyance, but it's a one time cost for a small subset of their users. I would prefer if there was a flow during device setup that allowed you to opt into developer mode (with all the attendant big scary warnings), but it's a pretty reasonable balance for the vast majority of their users. (I suspect the number of scammers that are able to get a victim to buy a whole new device and onboard it is probably very low).
Good point, having a once off advanced option to completely bypass this at device setup would be good.
Also, other commenters have mentioned that adb is unaffected by this which makes it seem like less of a problem, to me at least. Still inconvenient that even if you adb install fdroid you can't install apps directly from it.
They'll just remove the "Advanced" ability in a few years once they've frog boiled people into jumping through hoops to use their phone the way they want.
Developers, including non-US citizens, are forced to give Google their government ID to distribute apps. This enables Google to track and censor projects, like NewPipe, an alternative open source Youtube frontend, by revoking signing permissions for developers.
This. Side loading being restricted is only one part of the problem; the other is mandatory developer verification for apps distributed through the Play Store.
>Developers, including non-US citizens, are forced to give Google their government ID to distribute apps.
Developers can choose to not undergo verification, thereby remaining anonymous. The only change is that their applications will need to be installed via ADB and/or this new advanced flow on certified Android devices.
Either way, you can still distribute your apps wherever you want. If you verify your identity, then there are no changes to the existing installation flow from a user perspective. If you choose not to verify your identity, then the installation will still be possible but only through high-friction methods (ADB, advanced flow). These methods are high-friction so anonymous scammers can't easily coerce their victims into installing malicious software.
Not quite. You can do a lot of stuff that requires no permissions, or at least not ones that the user has to confirm (e.g. you get internet permission, sensor access, always run in the background etc. by default, but you do need to declare this in the manifest file iirc), which isn't possible on websites like that (a website will ask before it lets a site do limited things while you think the tab is closed)
Depending on your threat model, it might be mostly harmless
That's not correct - the flow described in the post outlines the requirements to install any apps that haven't had their signature registered with Google.
That means those apps still keep on existing, they are just more of a hassle to install.
They already announced it. Here they only mention the special case where it does not apply:
> In addition to the advanced flow we’re building free, limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists. This allows you to share apps with a small group (up to 20 devices) without needing to provide a government-issued ID or pay a registration fee.
i.e. Government-issued ID and fees are needed for more than 20 devices, e,g, every app on F-Droid
If there were a reliable way of identifying people making multiple accounts, it wouldn't be anonymous now would it? This not a loophole but inherent to an anonymous system
The trouble is, the accounts aren't meant to be anonymous. Pseudonymous at best, depending also on the country (a lot of places require government ID before you can assign a phone number, or have a central government querying system for mapping IP addresses and timestamp to the name and address of the subscriber that used it at the time). It's not like they let you create infinite Google accounts without supplying an infinite amount of fresh phone numbers or IP addresses. You also agree to the general Google privacy policy, which allows them to do anything for any purpose last I checked (a few years ago) unless you're a business customer (but then you've got a payment method in use, and they don't accept cash in the mail), such as fingerprinting as part of reCaptcha
It's not like the Google Play store hasn't been known to host malicious apps, yet you are not required to wait 24 hours before you install apps from their store.
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.
I'll say it again: this isn't a problem for Android to solve. Scammers will naturally adapt their "processes" to account for this 24-hour requirement and IMO it might make it seem more legitimate to the victim because there's less urgency.
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.
Why should the bank/institution be responsible for protecting individuals from themselves? They don't have police power- protecting people from bad actors is like, the reason to have a state. If the state wishes to farm it out to third parties, then we don't need the state anymore!
Yea I have no idea why the original commenter thinks Banks should have the power to tell me what I can and can't do with my own money.
It's nice that Zelle has checks and identity information shown to you when you're sending money, but if I click through 5 screens that say "Yes I know this person" but I actually don't.....no amount of regulation is going to solve that.
Banks absolutely have that power and will stop transactions that seem suspicious or fraudulent already, no? Sometimes they'll call/text to verify you want it go through. I imagine that type of thing but cranked up for accounts flagged "vulnerable" where a family or the person themselves can check a box saying "yes, lockdown this account heavily please" (or whatever you can imagine, idk, I'm not a bank)
The bank/institution is where the money is leaving from therefore they should implement policies that protect vulnerable customers like seniors, for example. I don't know how that looks but it seems reasonable that they could put limits on an account flagged "vulnerable person"
I'm not sure what you're getting at with the rant about police power and a state? Google isn't the government either. What would legislation provide that banks can't already do today?
Sure, there are things banks can do, and those are features they can market. But ultimately, if the state isn't pursuing criminals who prey on the vulnerable, then society as we know it has failed and we would need a new society, or a new state, or both...The bank can't arrest anyone!
I never said anything about it being Googles responsability, I agree it is not. And the only legislation that might be necessary over what we have is a budget directly to go after criminal fraudsters.
Fraud is already illegal, the issue is that these scammers reside in other countries. I don't doubt there could be pressure applied from really high up at the diplomatic level but I highly doubt the FBI for example is going to be able to do anything even with legislation.
> I'll say it again: this isn't a problem for Android to solve.
They're not solving that problem. They're using it as an excuse to lock down the platform further and assume more control. Any incidental benefit for user "security" is an unintended consequence of their real agenda.
What? No requirement to personally bring in a form in triplicate to the Google office in Siberia, of course notarized by the Pope and Zendaya, and simply prove it was signed on the moon.
It's a little inconvenient for someone setting up a new phone to have to wait a full day to install unregistered apps. But while I can't speak for others, it's a price I'm personally willing to pay to make the types of scams they mention much less effective. The perfect is the enemy of the good.
How would you feel about needing to wait 24 hours to visit an "unapproved" website on your phone? You would pay Google/Apple $25 to get whitelisted so people can browse to your personal website without getting a scary security message.
This is the same thing since it applies to all apps, not just apps that need special permissions.
On what basis do you believe that it will meaningfully reduce the dollars lost or persons harmed by fraud, as opposed to simple shuffling around the exact means used?
Tbh, I love this flow. They truely think for users, all users not just advanced users. Unlike Apple, Apple just think for its ecosystem, its money.
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.”
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.
Apple didn't lie about supporting a user's freedom to run anything they like, only to execute a rug pull after they successfully drove the other open options out of the marketplace.
Honestly, it might finally result in me fully exiting the Google ecosystem.
EDIT: Edited the above which previously said 90 days incorrectly. Not sure where my brain pulled that from but I posted the correct details here prior: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45743615
Notably if you install a month before your subscription expires you need to reinstall the app in 1 month.
It increases to 365 days, no? At least thats the longest I can sign my app and I use a personal but paid Apple Developer Account
But it's only 365 days if you install the app on day 1 of your $99 subscription period.
I think they later made a Black Mirror episode along these lines. "Resume viewing... Resume viewing..."
These are general purpose computing devices. It's sure taking a long time, but Cory Doctorow's talk on the war on general purpose computing is sure starting to become a depressing reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
Tongue-in-cheek example, just to get the point across: instead of calling it Developer Mode, call it "Scam mode (dangerous)". Require pressing a button that says "Someone might be scamming me right now." Then require the user to type (not paste) in a long sentence like "STOP! DO NOT CONTINUE IF SOMEONE IS TELLING YOU TO DO THIS! THIS IS A SCAM!"... you get the idea. Maybe ask them to type in some Linux command with special symbols to find the contents of some file with a random name. Then require a reboot for good measure and maybe require typing in another bit of text like "If a stranger told me to do this, it's a scam." Basically, make it as ridiculous and obnoxious as possible so that the message gets across loud and clear to anybody who doesn't know what they're doing.
There are just as many scam apps in play store and this system does nothing to help with those.
"Actually, you're secretly trying to destroy my phone."
"Okay, here's a solution that balances protecting unsophisticated users with accommodating power users."
"That's just FURTHER PROOF that you're secretly trying to destroy my phone."
You understand there's a real goal being pursued here, right? Suppose Google is dealing in good faith. Suppose 'solutions' that do not actually solve it, like 'just add a button with a warning label', or 'just don't accommodate them at all', are non-starters. How should they solve it differently? (They lay out all the reasoning in the article, so you can think through the same problems.)
I proposed a hypothetical, I encourage thinking through it regardless of what you currently think Google is doing. (And if you were saying something slightly less inane than that, ctrl-f 'control' in the rest of the comments to see the issue.)
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...
EDIT: I guess "just" is doing some heavy-lifting, so I won't argue this further, but "impossible" isn't the word I would use either. The city could revert this decision, definitely if enough people wanted them to (that's... I know, the hardest part). I just agree with the OP that we technically could go back to slightly less-digital society.
So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.
As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.
And cashless is the default.
It doesn't surprise me that they want to make hardware maintenance your problem.
I don't see the "impossible" in my understanding of the linked article.
Coin-operated meters means someone have to come around checking the meter, collect coins, check the parking tickets. One person can only cover so many devices per day.
Then you have mechanical maintenance, with that comes disputes with "it was broken, it didn't accept the money" and so forth.
I've probably forgotten a number of other related things, but compare the above to digital solution.
Parking app, where the customer pays only for the parked time, no fiddling with money or keeping track of time. The parking attendant checks much quicker by just scanning the license plate while walking the rounds (could be done via car and a mounted camera even).
Analog just costs more, and citizens doesn't want taxes to go to things that are not strictly necessary.
I don't even think this a fair comparison, it's more like keeping the old car just in case or for other family members. But I think I specified enough what I'm arguing already, yes this is unlikely, just not impossible.
For example, I read that Switzerland voted to guarantee the use of physical cash, even enshrining it in the constitution, which clearly points toward preserving older infrastructure. However, if you have cash but no one accepts it, it becomes useless. So it would probably require more—something like requiring businesses and the government to accept that form of payment.
As many things in life, not impossible: but is society willing to pay for that?
It is promising that Google has avoided just turning off sideloading but still put measures in place to protect people.
...and...
some people are gullible enough to go into a hidden setting on their phone and enable that in order to install an app from a random Chinese website
are kind of contradictory.
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.
One way to look at it: there are many open source projects targeting Android, projects that gain some sense of legitimacy over being open source yet have few (if any) eyes vetting them. Or, perhaps, the project is legitimate but people are getting third-party builds. That is what F-Droid does. That is what the developer of a third-party ROM does. It would not require the resources of a nation state to compromise them. I am not trying to cast a shadow on open source projects or F-Droid here. I am simply using them as an example because I use said software and am familiar with that ecosystem. The same goes for any software obtained outside of the Play Store, and it's likely worse since there is no transparency in those cases. Heck, the same goes for software obtained through the Play Store (but we're probably talking about nation state resources on that front).
Another way to look at it: we are only considering a specific avenue for exploitation here. If you close it off, the criminals will look for others. I would be surprised if they weren't looking for ways to bypass Google's checks. I would be surprised if they weren't looking for weaknesses in popular apps. Then there is social engineering. While convincing someone to install software is likely desirable, it certainly isn't the only approach.
Either way, I don't think Google's approach is solving the problem and I think it is going to do a huge amount of damage. Let's face it: major corporations aren't a paragon of goodness, yet Google's shift is handing them the market.
Ha ha ha, "resources of a nation state"! One could run phishing campaigns at scale over many years without breaking the bank. This was true before LLMs, it's probably even cheaper now.
And yet, people on HN respond to bots all the time.
Should we ever suffer a significant loss of customer identity data and/or funds, that risk was considered an existential threat for our customers and our institution.
I'm not coming to Google's defense, but fraud is a big, heavy, violent force in critical infrastructure.
And our phones are a compelling surface area for attacks and identity thefts.
Then also allow the kernel to run linux as a process, and run whatever you like there, however you want.
Its technically possible at the device level. The hard part seems to be UX. Do you show trusted and untrusted apps alongside one another? How do you teach users the difference?
My piano teacher was recently scammed. The attackers took all the money in her bank account. As far as I could tell, they did it by convincing her to install some android app on her phone and then grant that app accessibility permissions. That let the app remotely control other apps. They they simply swapped over to her banking app and transferred all the money out. Its tricky, because obviously we want 3rd party accessibility applications. But if those permissions allow applications to escape their sandbox, and its trouble.
(She contacted the bank and the police, and they managed to reverse the transactions and get her her money back. But she was a mess for a few days.)
And this almost certainly means that the bank took a fraud-related monetary loss, because the regulatory framework that governs banks makes it difficult for them to refuse to return their customer's money on the grounds that it was actually your piano teacher's fault for being stupid with her bank app on her smartphone (also, even if it were legal to do so, doing this regularly would create a lot of bad press for the bank). And they're unlikely to recover the losses from the actual scammers.
Fraud losses are something that banks track internally and attempt to minimize when possible and when it doesn't trade-off against other goals they have, such as maintaining regulatory compliance or costing more money than the fraud does. This means that banks - really, any regulated financial institution at all that has a smartphone app - have a financial incentive to encourage Apple and Google to build functionality into their mass-market smartphone OSs that locks them down and makes it harder for attackers to scam ordinary, unsophisticated customers in this way. They have zero incentive to lobby to make smartphone platforms more open. And there's a lot more technically-unsophisticated users like your piano teacher than there are free-software-enthusiasts who care about their smartphone OS provider not locking down the OS.
I think this is a bad thing, but then I'm personally a free-software-enthusiast, not a technically-unsophisticated smartphone user.
In which country? This happened in Australia. The rules are almost certainly different from the US.
This won't work. It's turtles all the way down and it will just end up back where we are now.
More software will demand installation in the sandboxed enclave. Outside the enclave the owner of the device would be able to exert control over the software. The software makers don't want the device owners exerting control of the software (for 'security', or anti-copyright infringement, or preventing advertising avoidance). The end user is the adversary as much as the scammer, if not more.
The problem at the root of this is the "right" some (entitled) developers / companies believe they have to control how end users run "their" software on devices that belongs to the end users. If a developer wants that kind of control of the "experience" the software should run on a computer they own, simply using the end user's device as "dumb terminal".
Those economics aren't as good, though. They'd have to pay for all their compute / storage / bandwidth, versus just using the end user's. So much cheaper to treat other people's devices like they're your own.
It's the same "privatize gains, socialize losses" story that's at the root of so many problems.
It may still be an improvement over the situation now though. At least something like this would let you run arbitrary software on the device. That software just wouldn't have "root", since whatever you run would be running in a separate container from the OS and banking apps and things.
It would also allow 3rd party app stores, since a 3rd party app store app could be a sandboxed application itself, and then it could in turn pass privileges to any applications it launches.
You also have so much grey area where things aren't actual illegal, such as gathering a massive amount of information on adults in the US via third party cookies and ubiquitous third party javascript.
Thats why platforms created in the internet age are much more opinionated on what API they provide to apps, much more stringent on sandboxing, and try to push software installation onto app stores which can restrict apps based on business policy, to go beyond technological and legal limitations.
Did she make it through the non-google play app install flow?
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.
Even Fortnite gave up on direct installs. If one of most popular game in the world can't make it, who can?
So yes, hundreds of millions of people care about this.
"Ruining Android for everyone" ("to try to maybe help some") does not mean, "Android is now ruined for X, for all X." It means, perhaps confusingly, pretty much the opposite.
It means: "There exists some X for which Android is now ruined (because Google is trying to protect Y, for all Y)." (Yes, really. The way the other person phrased it is the right way way to phrase it—or, at least, it's a valid way to phrase it.)
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.
we should probably workshop ideas that are within reality.
downvoters are welcome to tell me how they would approach a worlwide review of everything that requires internet and un-internet it. i will wait.
some primer questions to get your brain turning: who organizes and conducts the review? who pays for the review? who pays for the implementations? whats the messaging and how do you convince people to go along with rethinking/re-implementing their entire already-working infrastructure that they have potentially spent millions to billions of dollars on? do you just dissolve all of the internet-only services, and tell the founders to suck it? who enforces it and how?
If a business has more than X employees / does more than X amount of business per year / has more than X physical locations (pick one or more, make up some new criteria, tune to suit the needs of society) it must offer the same capabilities to interact with the business to those without smart phones as those with.
Small businesses wouldn't be radically impacted because they generally aren't "Internet only" anyway. The large business that are impacted have plenty of resources to handle compliance. If anything I'd argue it levels the playing field to an extent.
1) if you make it only applicable to smart phones, i just stop offering an uber smartphone app and now uber is website-only. if you apply it to "internet", as the original poster did, then:
2) companies like uber would be forced to shut down. you can say "cool, if they cant do it, their problem", which is fine, but a dozen of major issues pop up if something like 1/4 of the businesses currently propping up the stock market have to close doors or otherwise invest billions of dollars in phone centers or whatever they need.
it also raises questions about all sorts of businesses. another off the top of my head example: should 1password setup a call center where i can tell the operator what my new hackernews password is? is 1password exempt even if they have hundreds of employees and do millions per year? if yes, we have to come up with a bunch of murky criteria and definitions of what companies are exempt (across every industry, no less). which will, of course, cost a lot of time and money, just to surely be gamed. can we convince tax payers to foot that bill?
(this is also ignoring the approximately 0% chance that some sort of regulation of this sort gets pushed into law, against all of the extremely powerful tech lobbies. we dont even have ubiquitous right-to-repair!)
There won't ever be any consumer protection legislation like I suggested. I know that. It would make things better, but it'll never happen.
Things aren't going to get better for people who don't want to be forced to use new technology. (Eventually it'll be you being forced, too.)
I'm arguing, much in the way some techies bemoan removing malware from their parents' computer as an argument for why we shouldn't be allowed to use our mobile computers for what we want, for businesses to be required to offer ways of interacting to people who don't want to own smartphones. My argument isn't in the interests of powerful lobbies.
My wife and I have been helping her elderly aunt deal with a bank recently. I was shocked at the assumption her aunt would be able to receive SMS, use a smartphone with a camera to do "identity verification", etc. This lady has a flip phone, a land line, and no personal computer. Sure-- she could meet with someone at a branch to help her. Their first available meeting was a month away.
It's not going to get fixed. Nobody with the power to do anything about it cares.
i am saying that you cant do a worldwide systematic review of everything that relies on the internet, and un-internet it.
if you have a realistic approach to doing so, i will eat my shoe.
your idea is not the One Good Idea that everyone must subscribe to or else they must shrug and give up.
but, lets hear it. what specifically is involved in "pushing for it"?
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.
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.
Now imagine that every restaurant in your city is owned by one of two megacorporations and they really don't want you to have a microwave at home, let alone a stove. They expect that you will get all your food from them. This is where it's going with apps right now.
I think it's fine to give people an easy mode. Not everyone cares about cooking (or tech). I just wish companies weren't trying to take the advanced features from the rest of us who do care.
I'd imagine someone who is passionate about cooking wouldn't be delighted if you cloudn't buy any ingredients in a store.
I see the value in precooked food and black-box working technology. But for me myself, as an enthusiast: I like being able to tinker and control my technology.
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.
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.
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.
What guarantees your banking app is the right one? A PNG and an app name with no security whatsoever.
That means the people who say "I can evaluate the intricacies and impacts of software authorization" have significantly fewer speciality devices to pick from, and those devices may not be worth developers (or regulators) making carve-outs to support.
We haven't started watering crops with salt-water but it's only a matter of time.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-israel-floods-...
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.
Not saying that this is right on principle.
The problem is that most apps target only those two, and the second is trying to moron-proof, loosing most of it value to part of its users, while the apps are still locked in.
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.
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.
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.
So long as the 5g chips and the 2 mobile app stores remain under control, then 5 eyes has nearly full coverage.
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.
Of course it might be that they want more control. In addition to controlling the world's most popular web browser and the world's most popular search engine and the world's most popular online advertising network and the world's most popular online video service.
While signing is useful, leaving no escape hatch imo is blatantly predatory
As someone that was going to switch from iPhone to Android/Pixel later this year, at least now I know not to bother anymore, as the locking down of Android won't stop here.
Pretty much illegal in some parts of EU
Also how is it related to the EU if it only affects certain places? Could have just said certain places in Europe
There are upcoming limits for cash transactions (10K, countries can opt to go lower), and strong requirements for identity verification at 3K or more euros in cash.
See: https://www.deloittelegal.de/dl/en/services/legal/perspectiv...
EDIT: The other side of the coin is that banks are _required_ to give legal residents of a country a basic account that can be used for payments.
You also cannot get a tax refund or pay taxes without a bank account.
-have a steady contract -are paid more than 1000€ for a job (say you are self-employed).
Not if you want to make a purchase beyond a small amount, like $500 or $1000. Then it has to be through some fucking bank or CC.
You "may" but maybe you "cannot".
That's ridiculous. Phones are being made more and more of a requirement to participate in society, including by governments.
The latter is what's ridiculous, not what the parent suggests.
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.
We basically do this with everything. Unix is a great operating system, but the Mac version, made for morons, is practically unusable it's so dumbed down.
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.
Ok, but why is this advertised to applications in the first place? It's quite literally none of their business that developer options are enabled and it's a constant source of pain when some government / banking apps think they're being more "secure" by disallowing this.
Someone is just going to make a nice GUI application for sideloading apks with a single drag-and-drop, so if your idea is that ADB is a way to ensure only "users who know what they're doing" are gonna sideload, you've done nothing. This is all security theatre.
Not applying the policy to adb installs makes a lot more sense if the people this is trying to protect don't have a computer
This just adds the step of "download Cool ABD Installer from the play store" to the set of directions I would think.
Allow a toggle with no waiting period during initial device setup. The user is almost certainly not being guided by a scammer when they're first setting up their device, so this addresses the concern Google claims is driving the verification requirement. I'll be pretty angry if I have to wait a day to install F-Droid and finish setting up a new phone.
Evil, for the record would mean blocking developers of things that do not act against the user's wishes, but might offend governments or interfere with Google's business model, like the article's example of an alternative YouTube client that bypasses Google’s ads. Youtube is within its rights to try to block such clients, but preventing my device from installing them when that's what I want to do is itself a malicious act.
Reconsider.
This is hot garbage. Eliminating third party app stores like F-Droid defeats the whole purpose many of us even bother running Android instead of locked down Apple stuff.
It says something about 'restart your phone and reauthenticate' that's why I'm asking. What do you autenticate?
> ADB installs are not impacted by the waiting period, so that is an option if you need to install certain unregistered applications immediately.
Um yeah but then do I have to install every update via adb? I want to just use F-Droid.
You're authenticating that you're the device owner (via your device's saved biometrics or PIN/pattern/password).
>Um yeah but then do I have to install every update via adb? I want to just use F-Droid.
No, once you go through the advanced flow and choose the option to allow installing unregistered apps indefinitely, you can both install and update unregistered apps without going through the flow again (or using ADB).
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.
Scammers aren't going to wait on the phone for a day with your elderly parent.
Scammers will definitely call back the next day to continue. But it is quite possible that by then the victim has realized, or talked to someone who helped them realize that they are being scammed.
She went to a bank to transfer the scammer money. They told her no. She came back the next day. The police got involved and explained everything to her. Then she came back the next day. After that, she apparently found another location which let her transfer the money.
There's basically zero chance a 24 hour (or any amount of a) cool off period will help these people.
Like, I'm sure there's a small amount of people who normally wouldn't get scammed but fall for it in a panic. But, is that really such a big concern for Google that they absolutely must continue stripping user freedoms from us? Is the current 30s popup which needs 3 confirmations not enough? Will the new one really work?
"Google will call you again tomorrow to get you your refund."
There, we've successfully circumvented all of Google's security engineering on this "feature."
https://youtu.be/YIR-nJv_-VA?t=121
They don't mind being patient when they have dozens of other victims in the wait queue.
tl;dr of this post is that Google wants to lock down Android and be its gatekeeper. Every other point of discussion is just a distraction.
So Google's going to add some nonsense abstraction layer and when this fails to curb the problem after a 24 hour wait, it will be extended more maybe a week, and more information must be collected to release it. We all know how this goes.
24 is just so long.
But also, my expectation is that a scammer is going to just automate the flow here anyways. Cool, you hit the "24 hour" wait period, I'll call you back tomorrow, the next day, or the next day and continue the scam process.
It might stop some less sophisticated spammers for a little bit, but I expect that it'll just be a few tweaks to make it work again.
There will be some proportion of people who mention to their spouse/child/friend about how Google called them to fix their phone, and are saved by that waiting period.
The question is, why exactly 24 hours? The argument is that the time limit is set to protect the users and sacrifice usability to do so. So it would be prudent to set the time limit to the shortest amount that will protect the user -> and that shortest amount is apparently 24 hours, which is rather.. suspiciously long and round :)
Someone who lives in another timezone or works weird hours etc. Our routines generally repeat on 24hour schedules, so likely to be one point of overlap.
Unless you want to pick 1 week. But that's a lot more annoying.
They have infinite time and patience.
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.
Installing apps manually or through another store app is not "sideloading".
Sideloading is the new jaywalking, a newish word to pretend that a pretty normal action would be in any way illegal, dangerous or harmful.
If you turn off developer options, then to turn off the advanced flow, you would first have to turn developer options back on.
Would apps installed from F-Droid be subject to this process, or would they also be exempt? Could that be a solution that makes everyone happy? Android already tracks which app store an app originates from re: autoupdating.
I disagree with this. Won't somebody who need to sideload something will just try again the next day...
JFC. Why would an app be allowed to know this? Just another datapoint for fingerprinting.
0: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/provider/Set...
This isn't a rhetorical question. There's no big red warning on the developer options screen saying it's dangerous. I haven't heard about real-world attacks leveraging developer settings. I suppose granting USB debug to an infected PC is dangerous, but if you're in that situation, you're already pwned.
Is there a real vulnerability nobody talks about?
In this case, they don't want users to reverse-engineer their app or look at logs that might inadvertently leak information about how to reverse-engineer their app. It is pointless, I know, but some security consultant has created a checkbox which must be checked at all costs.
It is like mandating that people use rainjackets in the rain to avoid getting cancer.
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.
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.
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.
It's not a win by any means. I hope that we don't stop making noise.
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.
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).
Citation needed. My Pixel 7a with the latest updates has settings for call recording in the phone app. Since I never screwed around with it, I'd assume these are the defaults:
Call recording is turned on, with "asks to record calls" set
Automatically delete recordings is "never"
Automatically record calls with non-contacts is off
No specific numbers to automatically record calls are set
There is also a note that you have to agree to their ToS to use it, and I'd also suggest being careful if you live in a jurisdiction that requires two-party consent for recording.
In any case, I'm of the opinion that if F-Droid goes, I'm basically going to treat this as a feature phone and stay away from third-party apps in general aside from "musts" like banking.
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 will die on this hill.
Companies get away from this because they distance themselves from their customers and they have systems to hide feedback.
Wondering how long the blogpost would be if it explained what the flow for corpoloading applications approved by Google's shareholders would be?
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.
Do you think there's two groups, and the people that cared simply went with Android and so there was never this outcry about installing free software on iOS, or that this will last only as long as the change still feels recent and like a new restriction?
2) You can use ADB to immediately install unregistered apps. ADB installs are not subject to the waiting period.
I forgot 3) instruct my users how to use ADB from another computer to install my competing app. Awesome.
You'd think regulators should make Google ship a 'Choose my store(s)' screen at setup, but Google thinks the opposite is the case and Google should also be able to control app distribution outside of the Playstore.
4) How can we install apps made by devs who won't do the verification dance with Google?
Thus, you can still install unregistered apps if they're distributed via F-Droid or other sources, but to do so, you will need to use ADB and/or go through the new advanced flow. And remember, the new advanced flow is a one-time process - once you go through with it, you can allow your device to install unregistered apps indefinitely!
No, I'm afraid this is tipping the scale of control in Google's favor.
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.
Let’s be clear here.
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.
And Google thinks they can pull this? I hope regulators make it very clear that this is the wrong direction, and with record fines.
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.
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.
Now if only Android would allow for stronger sandboxing of apps (i.e. lie to them about any and all system settings).
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
Ah, its not much, just an email away ...
oh, not much it's email and a phone call away ...
Just wait 7 days ... no, it's just a month, and only one device par account? What's wrong with it? You are overreacting
Wait! Why you want to unlock your boot loader, only 0.000001% does it. You are abnormal, not the mass user
Fool me once it's on you Fool me twice ... it's on me.
We are already over twice, but none the wiser.
For now, I am rolling with my OnePlus 7 with LineageOS, till I find a phone that's not completely locked down. Yes, it's old, but it gets my job done. Once I am off all of Google's services, I'll probably get rid of Google in most part of my life.
As, someone who is a user from invite only Gmail, it's difficult, but necessary.
Helping the vulnerable should not involve that. If your only idea on how to help the vulnerable involves that, think of better ideas.
And it's not just Google, it's the m.o. of all large corporations. Another example is Epic Games, they advertise how they will fight in court against big companies like Google and Apple to defend their users. Yet they've gotten fined repeatedly for amounts in the millions, for predatory micro-transactions, and misleading minors into spending money without the consent of their parents.
Time and time again it is proven that everything these companies do, it's always for the benefit of their bottom line, and consideration for their users does not even factor into their considerations. This is no different, they want to push it because it will give them more control or make them money, and it either won't protect anyone, or that's just an unintended side effect but a good way to market it.
I'd say this has nothing to do with preventing scams, but to make independent software more difficult to distribute.
It's my phone. It's my software. Period.
The general population is deterred by burying a setting deep. Waiting is a dark pattern and we're not idiots.
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...
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.
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.
You will not need a Google account.
I switched from iOS to Android about three years ago. I saved all the APKs for everything I installed (or updated). When I got a new phone last fall it was pleasantly like geting a new PC. I imported my SMS and contacts from my last backup, then installed all the apps I use and imported or manually set any settings I wanted to customize.
The biggest pain was having to manually logon the couple of sites I allow to keep persistent cookies since device owners aren't allowed to just import/export cookies from mobile Chrome.
Meanwhile from the Play Store I have Bitwarden, Firefox, 2 banking apps, a few airline apps, Wireguard and Whatsapp. So I actually have more from F-Droid than the Play Store from what I regularly use.
I sideload no apps. I install most apps from either F-Droid main, or an other repo.
> Why those apps are not in a store?
All of them are in a repository. Just only the state sponsored ID-app is only available via the ad-infected Google RAT delivery service, also known as Google Play.
Why'd I put my app into their store if I don't agree with the store owner's policies?
Can I keep this freedom?
There are some true gems such as:
(I'm not sure if you wanted to edit in entries or if this was our cue :D)
Its just installing an app.
Just call it "installing".
The security justification for this measure is not credible.
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).
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.
But these developer verification policies don't make any exceptions for permission-light apps, nor do they make it harder to sideload apps which request dangerous permissions, they just identify developers. I also suspect that making developer verification dependent on app manifest permissions opens up a bypass, as the package manager would need to check both on each update instead of just on first install.
And how hard/expensive should it be for the developer of a legitimate F/OSS app to intercept calls/texts?
This should not be required for apps that do HTTPS requests and store app-local data, like 99%+ of all apps, including 99% of F-Droid apps.
But, in my opinion, the benefit of anonymity to you is much smaller than the harm of anonymous malware authors coaching/coercing users to install phone-takeover apps.
(I'm sure you and I won't agree about this; I bet you have a principled stand that you should be able to anonymously distribute malware phone-takeover apps because "I own my device," and so everyone must be vulnerable to being coerced to install malware under that ethical principle. It's a reasonable stance, but I don't share it, and I don't think most people share it.)
But yes they are my devices, and I should be able to do exactly what I want with them. If I'm forced to deal with other developers incredibly shitty decisions around how they treat VoIP numbers, guess who's going to have a stack of phones with cheap plans in the office instead of paying a VoIP provider...
But no, I have no interest in actually distributing software like that further than than the phones sitting in my office.
Getting someone to verify their identity before they have the permission to completely takeover my phone feels pretty reasonable to me. It should be a cheap, one-time process to verify your identity and develop an app with that much power.
I can already hear the reply, "What a slippery slope! First Google will make you verify identity for complete phone takeovers, but soon enough they'll try to verify developer identity for all apps."
But if I'm forced to choose between "any malware author can anonymously intercept texts and calls" or "only identified developers can do that, and maybe someday Google will go too far with it," I'm definitely picking the latter.
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."
That's why I'm inclined to believe Google is just using safety as an excuse to further leverage their monopoly.
If so, it's clear that none of these changes are actually to protect users.
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.
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.
Also, other commenters have mentioned that adb is unaffected by this which makes it seem like less of a problem, to me at least. Still inconvenient that even if you adb install fdroid you can't install apps directly from it.
Developers can choose to not undergo verification, thereby remaining anonymous. The only change is that their applications will need to be installed via ADB and/or this new advanced flow on certified Android devices.
Either way, you can still distribute your apps wherever you want. If you verify your identity, then there are no changes to the existing installation flow from a user perspective. If you choose not to verify your identity, then the installation will still be possible but only through high-friction methods (ADB, advanced flow). These methods are high-friction so anonymous scammers can't easily coerce their victims into installing malicious software.
Are apps like this more dangerous than browsing to a website? I thought they were entirely sandboxed from the rest of the device?
Depending on your threat model, it might be mostly harmless
That means those apps still keep on existing, they are just more of a hassle to install.
> In addition to the advanced flow we’re building free, limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists. This allows you to share apps with a small group (up to 20 devices) without needing to provide a government-issued ID or pay a registration fee.
i.e. Government-issued ID and fees are needed for more than 20 devices, e,g, every app on F-Droid
The trouble is, the accounts aren't meant to be anonymous. Pseudonymous at best, depending also on the country (a lot of places require government ID before you can assign a phone number, or have a central government querying system for mapping IP addresses and timestamp to the name and address of the subscriber that used it at the time). It's not like they let you create infinite Google accounts without supplying an infinite amount of fresh phone numbers or IP addresses. You also agree to the general Google privacy policy, which allows them to do anything for any purpose last I checked (a few years ago) unless you're a business customer (but then you've got a payment method in use, and they don't accept cash in the mail), such as fingerprinting as part of reCaptcha
Note that the OP is about side loading, i.e. installing apps from non-Play Store sources and thereby circumventing developer verification.
Does it have a Linux kernel? Of course. But this isn't a free operating system.
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.
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.
It's nice that Zelle has checks and identity information shown to you when you're sending money, but if I click through 5 screens that say "Yes I know this person" but I actually don't.....no amount of regulation is going to solve that.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with the rant about police power and a state? Google isn't the government either. What would legislation provide that banks can't already do today?
I never said anything about it being Googles responsability, I agree it is not. And the only legislation that might be necessary over what we have is a budget directly to go after criminal fraudsters.
They're not solving that problem. They're using it as an excuse to lock down the platform further and assume more control. Any incidental benefit for user "security" is an unintended consequence of their real agenda.
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.
This is the same thing since it applies to all apps, not just apps that need special permissions.