This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch.
You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that way that just makes it a crappier shadow of the vastly superior apple experience. And, as it turns out, ios is less restrictive than it was 18 years ago when I left them for Android!
I'm on this path too. Waiting a few more months to see what happens. If they indeed block my 4 apps on my phone (which aren't published anywhere), I will simply move to Apple.
Will your 4 unpublished apps be in your android-alternative apple device?
Android will still have the ability to install non-google-distributed programs. The problem is the ominous momentum, but it is still more open than the apple alternative
>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it.
This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.
I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other.
So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance.
In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)
You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years.
Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.
To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pointing a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.
With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.
From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order.
I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.
Let me play out a scenario, imagine to use a Desktop Hardware like a complete built rig, you would need a specific OS like Windows 11 and you could not run Linux on it, just because it's a vendor lock-in.
Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above?
I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
To be sincere, they were never truly ours. A proof of that is they were able to come up with this, and you don't have a way to reject it.
What we actually need are (open) alternatives, not to double down on Google's ecosystem and Google-controlled OS. We need to control the device we bought and be able to run whatever we wish on it. Just like we do on PCs.
I don't care, I run Graphene, and my phone is definitely mine. Most Android apps just work, and the ones that don't are the kind of malware I am happy to do without.
I use GrapheneOS too. Most of the time it works great, with some weird bugs around group messages and needing to restart every now and then to get to a fully functional state between the browser and keyboard properly working with each other and the network connectivity going away. I do enjoy full control on network connectivity and notifications.
But beyond whether the OS is good or not, "fuck you, I've got mine" is not only sad as a position in general, it is also a bad tactical choice, because over long enough timeframes you can't assure that you can keep yours if others are deprived.
I've been using it for a bit over a year. Installed in a few minutes thanks to WebUSB. A bit of research needed to set the right permissions on Google Play Services.
After that? I only had one application fail due to Graphene's memory allocator. No weird bugs, no need to restart like some siblings are commenting. As close to the "Graphene just works" as it could be.
However, I'm not heavy into Google's ecosystem. Google Pay will not work but I'm not a user, some Google features won't tell you why they don't work but I'm not using them either (Quick Share for instance), none of my apps require the highest Play Integrity level. Maybe the person who say this are a specific type of person where use-cases don't overlap with what breaks on Graphene.
I'm running GrapheneOS too and while I've experienced the same, I'm dreading the day any of my banking apps update and suddenly start demanding full Play Integrity API support (GrapheneOS only has Basic) causing them to fail to open. Hasn't happened yet but it could.
Devs have been warning F-Droid about this for years:
It's quite problematic that someone can currently upload a package name belonging to another organization to the Play Store and that should have been stopped years ago since it was used in many cases for scamming and squatting on package names clearly belonging to others. Package names are meant to start with a reverse domain belonging to the owner such as app.grapheneos for our grapheneos.app domain. They could enforce this based on domains authorizing usage without enforcing ID verification and that's what we would have proposed.
This is one of the ways F-Droid has ignored standard best practices including security practices in a way that's already causing problems but is now a massive issue for them. If they had started doing things properly many years ago when it was first brought up, then they'd be in a much better situation today. They're going to need to deal with this by renaming all their package names to org.fdroid. to avoid issues with the proposed changes. This is problematic because existing users will stop getting updates. It's better to use a prefix than a suffix where a developer could end up changing their mind about whether it makes sense resulting in conflict over the name, which is fair since they still own it if it's their reverse domain.
Assuming that this Graphene partnership ends up working out, this is probably what I will end up doing once my current iPhone dies. I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max, it's a good phone and I don't really have a desire to get rid of it, but eventually it will break, or get stolen, or in some other way become unusable, and as such it will need to be replaced.
I really hated my Pixel 7 Pro, but I think that was bad hardware and not Android's fault, and since buying my iPhone 13 I have bought my Thinkpad and have been unbelievably impressed with Lenovo hardware (especially since the last Android phone that I bought that I actually liked was my Moto X3).
It would be great if Graphene ends up getting support from at least one first party, because at that point I think there's at least a chance it won't screw with banking apps and the like.
That's a great attitude until slowly but surely 90% of apps used in day to day life won't function for you: banking, dating, social media, e-commerce, communication/messaging etc slowly freeze you out.
This is a wild misrepresentation of the situation. Saying there is no opt-out is just false, they even provide the information on how users can opt-out. The "mandatory 24 hour cooling-off period" is also misleading, it's easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB.
They mentioned that people like you would show up. "Push back on astroturfers. The "well, actually..." crowd is out in force. Don't let them set the narrative."
I can't see where one can opt-out of this new behavior and into the existing behavior, only a description of the new behavior's bypass (which is not the same thing at all)
> easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB
I don't think this is a reasonable use of the term "easy". I should be able to give my non-technical friend an apk and they can use it right then, with the one "are you very sure" screen.
I will say, an underrated use case for even small, local LLMs is making command line tools drastically more accessible to laypeople
I now know zero people I don't think should use linux, and people I know seems to run quite a gamut of technical know-how compared to most other technical folks I know
And I kind of buy the intent behind the cooling-off period anyway. IIRC it's to prevent people from being pressured into installing apps by scammers that could then take their phones hostage
Yes. That attack is a very real attack. The attacker gets access to the victim's phone and sideloads additional apps that appear to be the victim's legitimate banking application. The victim logs into it and sees a fake balance (as the app is fake). Pressure and other social engineering tactics are invoked and the scammer walks away with all of the victim's money.
I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware.
This feels like something where the EU Commission should step in. This is directly counter to the Digital Markets Act, it's Google abusing its gatekeeper position.
The communication on this front page is excellent given the intended audience, with the right mixing of emphasis and punctuation for effect.
I'd like to see, if it can be found, some anecdotes about the nuts and bolts of writing any kind of material intended to persuade in this way. How do they a/b test the formatting and so on.
There is a negative network effect: The opt-out is so complex and time-consuming that it will deter almost all users (even if some on HN say they will do it).
With so few users, many fewer developers will release apps that don't comply with Google's requirements. Then the value of opting out will decline significantly, which will reduce the number of people doing it, which will reduce the number of apps released ...
How do corporate users distribute custom apps on iPhones? Must they distribute them via Apple's store or is there some corporate mode, maybe involving X.509 certs and device management, that enables large-scale professional users to sideload?
Algorithmically removing words from a headline with confidence that what comes out will be better is the precise intersection of stupid and arrogant that defines the modern tech industry.
Yes, but not because of those changes in the GMS stock OS, but because the ability to unlock the bootloader (and install the OS you can actually control) is being increasingly limited.
Stock GMS Android was never yours, you only had access to basic permissions, privileged/signature permissions were only accessible to Google/vendors anyway.
On one hand, having a free for all is very good, especially for developers, and for programmability of our devices as such. Screw iPads.
On the other hand, malware which coaxes normies into installing unverified apks, is an undeniable fact of life. It's nice to be pontificating as a power user who has never been phished or whose devices never became botnet zombies in their life.
On yet another hand, higher-end malware (made by those who can afford the store fees) is there on the freaking play store and app store, so, I guess, shrug
Not much, as it only works on very few high end phones not sold in most countries. Hopefully their Motorola partnership will expand its availability but I'm not confident that'll happen anytime soon.
Sadly forget about it - GrapheneOS will only work on Motorola __flagship__ devices, and most of their budget phones are not even made by Motorola, but rather by the odm such as Tinno, where it's not even possible to unlock the bootloader without exploits.
You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device and losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community. GrapheneOS might not be a big enough community to sustain work on the projects delivered by F-Droid.
>You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device
IME such apps are few and far between. The most trouble I ran into is play store refusing to show apps because they claim the app isn't compatible with the device, but that can be worked around with aurora store.
I think parent is talking about Play Integrity being integrated into banking apps. It's a hit or miss depending on the bank, some will be fine without, some with integrate it but not rely on it to directly refuse login, some will require a lower integrity level, and some will actually require the highest integrity level leading to issues on custom ROMs.
They really aren't. The number of apps requiring Play Integrity grows every day, my own bank's app hasn't worked in years and I've long given up on it, I just use it on a second stock device now.
And Google has an answer to the "just install the APK from somewhere else" workaround, too. Many apps now integrate a check that prevents them from running if they're not properly linked to the Play Store.
> losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community.
For me it seems the opposite - if these "normal" (GMS spyware) Android devices lose the access to F-Droid and it will only be possible to install malware/adware from Google Play, then maybe that will push more people to value unlocking the bootloader..
In addition to what others have said, it means some developers who were building for Android are going to stop. You can't install an app when someone is obstructed from building it in the first place.
> every Android app developer must register centrally with Google before their software can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: all apps.
> Registration requires:
> Paying a fee to Google
> Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions
> Surrendering your government-issued identification
> Providing evidence of your private signing key
> Listing all current and all future application identifiers
Google is not an entity you can can trust with this.
Delve into System Settings, find Developer Options
Tap the build number seven times to enable Developer Mode
Dismiss scare screens about coercion
Enter your PIN
Restart the device
Wait 24 hours
Come back, dismiss more scare screens
Pick "allow temporarily" (7 days) or "allow indefinitely"
Confirm, again, that you understand "the risks"
Nine steps. A mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period. For installing
software on a device you own.
Worse: this flow runs entirely through Google Play Services, not the Android OS. Google can change it, tighten it, or kill it at any time, with no OS update required and no consent needed.
And as of today, it hasn't shipped in any beta, preview, or canary build.
It exists only as a blog post and some mockups.
To be fair, that's a one time process. You do not need to do that for every app you want to sideload.
The malware issue that the flow is designed to mitigate is a very real problem. Perhaps there is a better way, but it's not immediately clear what that is.
You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.
Unless they do something google doesn't like, or trip one of their many automated systems that ban them without recourse. Or they are compelled to revoke a key by a government.
Revocations are for apps being malware and nothing else, much like macOS Gatekeeper (Apple doesn't even revoke certs used by Warez groups to sign cracked apps).
Automated bans can be an issue, but that's an edge case. Google already had the functionality to 'revoke' an app if ordered to do so by a legal authority.
It is much more important to make a real world attack - something that is draining wallets of ordinary people across Thailand/Brazil/SEA in general - harder to achieve. One thing is a political goal of some people in the west, the other is an ordinary person not having the money to feed themselves because a scammer stole it all.
I can't trust Google will keep to that, sorry. Nor can I accept harms being twisted into a further centralised accumulation of power (especially when Google, with all their resources, could likely do much more to prevent these scams than grabbing that power for themselves)
Well, the very good news is that Google is not seeking your trust. You have no say at all. This is the new system, it benefits actual real people over HN commenters and you will just have to deal with it.
Google doesn't have the ability to change the way banking apps work with regards to transferring money from one account to another in Malaysia/Brazil/Thailand. That would be a matter for the national Governments. This is the best approach available.
Because grandmas all over the world are getting swindled by scam apps.
Look, I can't locally install a web extension I wrote on an open-source Firefox browser, because security. I have to install a Developer Edition, or get the extension reviewed and signed by Mozilla, for the very same reasons of thwarting scammers. Is this stifling, or is it making my browser not mine? Is anybody making a big deal out of that?
The world we inhabit is not always friendly. It has a ton of determined and sophisticated bad actors, and a lot of people with less technical savvy than you and me. We have to deal with that, instead of being cantankerous.
It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming. Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
And most Android banking malware is distributed through unsafe sideload installs (as opposed to much safer Gatekeeper-style installs, which is what is coming) and are fed to victims through complex attacks involving obtaining a victim's personal information and calling them while credibly pretending to be a local authority or a bank representative. You can read about this wherever you get news about cyber crime.
This is a scourge in South East Asia and Google can do some good here. The only cost is whining from non-technical people. Everyone else will go pay $25 or whatever and sign their app.
Play Store being a cesspit is indeed a problem! But it still is making a constant effort to drive away scammers, so scams don't last too long there. Scammers show sleek-looking web pages offering to install an "official app" from their own apk. Or they have an app that clandestinely sideloads another app. This is being curbed.
But it's limited to a one-time action, not encumbered by additional papers or payment. I don't foresee any trouble using F-Droid (which I use a lot) after I have dismissed the scary screens and confirmed that I know what I'm doing.
>It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming.
Because as a reader to this forum, you're probably more tech savvy that the average person. Moreover this type of scam seems to be more common in Asia than the West, see:
They convince users to download a "government app", grant it accessibility permissions, then use that to take over their phone and drain their bank accounts.
>Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
Where do you draw the line? If you whitelist f-droid, do you have to whitelist third party f-droid repos too? What about other app "stores" like obtanium? Moreover f-droid being less of a "cesspool" is likely because its reach is smaller, not because it has better moderation.
I'm aware of the way the scams work. I'm also aware that scammers tend to be much more motivated to jump through hoops that are put in front them (more so than legitimate users!). Scammers can also talk people through many, many warning signs.
Scammers cannot talk people past a 24 hour wait. This attack is built upon pressure and operates at a scale that makes stealing many identies, building different-enough apps to avoid getting flagged by Google and signing them all non-viable.
This isn't referring to the efforts Google has gone to try to thwart sideloading.
It is another requirement of Google's, where all developers must be registered to them and apps must be signed by them and anything that isn't will be blocked.
Ugh such overreaction. ADB is still a thing. Apple doesn't even have an official command like tool where you can just push an IPA to your phone. Goodness.
This change has served me well! I have been a Mac OS X users for years who used an android phone. As soon as google announced their impending walled garden status, I went out and bought into the ios eco system. I have really been enjoying my iphone, ipad, and apple watch.
You see, the only value that Android really offered me was the ability to run my own code on my own device. Since they are taking that way that just makes it a crappier shadow of the vastly superior apple experience. And, as it turns out, ios is less restrictive than it was 18 years ago when I left them for Android!
I'm on this path too. Waiting a few more months to see what happens. If they indeed block my 4 apps on my phone (which aren't published anywhere), I will simply move to Apple.
Will your 4 unpublished apps be in your android-alternative apple device?
Android will still have the ability to install non-google-distributed programs. The problem is the ominous momentum, but it is still more open than the apple alternative
>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it.
This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.
For you, is the openness of Android appealing as a matter of principle or does it enable you to do things you couldn't otherwise do?
I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other.
So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance.
In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)
Yes.
Can you expand on that? I'd like to understand the kinds of things millions of people are no longer going to be able to do.
There's no point anymore.
There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading.
In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this.
And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.
You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years.
Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.
To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pointing a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.
With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.
From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order.
I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.
Let me play out a scenario, imagine to use a Desktop Hardware like a complete built rig, you would need a specific OS like Windows 11 and you could not run Linux on it, just because it's a vendor lock-in.
Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above?
I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
From the state's perspective, probably along the same lines as why long guns are allowed with permit in many countries where handguns are banned.
To be sincere, they were never truly ours. A proof of that is they were able to come up with this, and you don't have a way to reject it.
What we actually need are (open) alternatives, not to double down on Google's ecosystem and Google-controlled OS. We need to control the device we bought and be able to run whatever we wish on it. Just like we do on PCs.
I don't care, I run Graphene, and my phone is definitely mine. Most Android apps just work, and the ones that don't are the kind of malware I am happy to do without.
I use GrapheneOS too. Most of the time it works great, with some weird bugs around group messages and needing to restart every now and then to get to a fully functional state between the browser and keyboard properly working with each other and the network connectivity going away. I do enjoy full control on network connectivity and notifications.
But beyond whether the OS is good or not, "fuck you, I've got mine" is not only sad as a position in general, it is also a bad tactical choice, because over long enough timeframes you can't assure that you can keep yours if others are deprived.
I have a pixel 10 pro and have tried no less than 5 times to get my apps to work on graphene, no luck.
I'm no slouch either, I've developed for android for almost a decade.
I'm not disagreeing with ya, just adding a comment so folks are aware that the "Graphene just works" crowd is sometimes a bit hyperbolic.
I've been using it for a bit over a year. Installed in a few minutes thanks to WebUSB. A bit of research needed to set the right permissions on Google Play Services.
After that? I only had one application fail due to Graphene's memory allocator. No weird bugs, no need to restart like some siblings are commenting. As close to the "Graphene just works" as it could be.
However, I'm not heavy into Google's ecosystem. Google Pay will not work but I'm not a user, some Google features won't tell you why they don't work but I'm not using them either (Quick Share for instance), none of my apps require the highest Play Integrity level. Maybe the person who say this are a specific type of person where use-cases don't overlap with what breaks on Graphene.
What apps?
(idle interest; I use Graphene, but few apps, and everything worked so far)
I'm running GrapheneOS too and while I've experienced the same, I'm dreading the day any of my banking apps update and suddenly start demanding full Play Integrity API support (GrapheneOS only has Basic) causing them to fail to open. Hasn't happened yet but it could.
Devs have been warning F-Droid about this for years:
It's quite problematic that someone can currently upload a package name belonging to another organization to the Play Store and that should have been stopped years ago since it was used in many cases for scamming and squatting on package names clearly belonging to others. Package names are meant to start with a reverse domain belonging to the owner such as app.grapheneos for our grapheneos.app domain. They could enforce this based on domains authorizing usage without enforcing ID verification and that's what we would have proposed.
This is one of the ways F-Droid has ignored standard best practices including security practices in a way that's already causing problems but is now a massive issue for them. If they had started doing things properly many years ago when it was first brought up, then they'd be in a much better situation today. They're going to need to deal with this by renaming all their package names to org.fdroid. to avoid issues with the proposed changes. This is problematic because existing users will stop getting updates. It's better to use a prefix than a suffix where a developer could end up changing their mind about whether it makes sense resulting in conflict over the name, which is fair since they still own it if it's their reverse domain.
Google could lock out Graphene too, whenever they like, with no warning. I hope Graphene has a plan.
Sadly it works only on Pixel phones.
They’ve announced a partnership with Motorola to have it installed on some of their phones in the future, so not just Pixels for long!
Assuming that this Graphene partnership ends up working out, this is probably what I will end up doing once my current iPhone dies. I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max, it's a good phone and I don't really have a desire to get rid of it, but eventually it will break, or get stolen, or in some other way become unusable, and as such it will need to be replaced.
I really hated my Pixel 7 Pro, but I think that was bad hardware and not Android's fault, and since buying my iPhone 13 I have bought my Thinkpad and have been unbelievably impressed with Lenovo hardware (especially since the last Android phone that I bought that I actually liked was my Moto X3).
It would be great if Graphene ends up getting support from at least one first party, because at that point I think there's at least a chance it won't screw with banking apps and the like.
That's a great attitude until slowly but surely 90% of apps used in day to day life won't function for you: banking, dating, social media, e-commerce, communication/messaging etc slowly freeze you out.
Are banks and e-commerce going to get rid of their websites? I imagine some will, but I can’t imagine using one that did.
Dating… well, the goal for most people is to exit the dating pool anyway.
Social media is bad.
First they came for the stock Android users, and I did not speak out for I was not a stock Android user.
This is a wild misrepresentation of the situation. Saying there is no opt-out is just false, they even provide the information on how users can opt-out. The "mandatory 24 hour cooling-off period" is also misleading, it's easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB.
They mentioned that people like you would show up. "Push back on astroturfers. The "well, actually..." crowd is out in force. Don't let them set the narrative."
> Saying there is no opt-out is just false
I can't see where one can opt-out of this new behavior and into the existing behavior, only a description of the new behavior's bypass (which is not the same thing at all)
> easy to bypass the cooling-off period with ADB
I don't think this is a reasonable use of the term "easy". I should be able to give my non-technical friend an apk and they can use it right then, with the one "are you very sure" screen.
I will say, an underrated use case for even small, local LLMs is making command line tools drastically more accessible to laypeople
I now know zero people I don't think should use linux, and people I know seems to run quite a gamut of technical know-how compared to most other technical folks I know
The way you give your non-technical friends an APK and they just install it is by you signing it.
But I want to let someone MITM my non-technical friend and repalce my APK with malware.
And I kind of buy the intent behind the cooling-off period anyway. IIRC it's to prevent people from being pressured into installing apps by scammers that could then take their phones hostage
Yes. That attack is a very real attack. The attacker gets access to the victim's phone and sideloads additional apps that appear to be the victim's legitimate banking application. The victim logs into it and sees a fake balance (as the app is fake). Pressure and other social engineering tactics are invoked and the scammer walks away with all of the victim's money.
Phone is yours. Software it runs not.
I imagine most of us here will look elsewhere when we next upgrade. But are those numbers large enough to form a viable alternative?
I'm doubtful, I for a bit bought a lot of the Pine64 devices thinking about this eg. not just Android/iOS... but the lack of feature parity eg. missing drivers, lack of apps, old hardware.
Unless people are paid to do it vs. volunteer
This feels like something where the EU Commission should step in. This is directly counter to the Digital Markets Act, it's Google abusing its gatekeeper position.
The communication on this front page is excellent given the intended audience, with the right mixing of emphasis and punctuation for effect.
I'd like to see, if it can be found, some anecdotes about the nuts and bolts of writing any kind of material intended to persuade in this way. How do they a/b test the formatting and so on.
There is a negative network effect: The opt-out is so complex and time-consuming that it will deter almost all users (even if some on HN say they will do it).
With so few users, many fewer developers will release apps that don't comply with Google's requirements. Then the value of opting out will decline significantly, which will reduce the number of people doing it, which will reduce the number of apps released ...
How do corporate users distribute custom apps on iPhones? Must they distribute them via Apple's store or is there some corporate mode, maybe involving X.509 certs and device management, that enables large-scale professional users to sideload?
ZERO. ZERO developers who don’t comply will make a living selling applications and services to the general public.
This is correct. The people who will refuse to pay $25 and sign their stuff are people with a political objective, not businesses.
Algorithmically removing words from a headline with confidence that what comes out will be better is the precise intersection of stupid and arrogant that defines the modern tech industry.
Yes, but not because of those changes in the GMS stock OS, but because the ability to unlock the bootloader (and install the OS you can actually control) is being increasingly limited.
Stock GMS Android was never yours, you only had access to basic permissions, privileged/signature permissions were only accessible to Google/vendors anyway.
Some more discussions:
2 weeks ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47778274
February https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47139765
October https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742488
On one hand, having a free for all is very good, especially for developers, and for programmability of our devices as such. Screw iPads.
On the other hand, malware which coaxes normies into installing unverified apks, is an undeniable fact of life. It's nice to be pontificating as a power user who has never been phished or whose devices never became botnet zombies in their life.
On yet another hand, higher-end malware (made by those who can afford the store fees) is there on the freaking play store and app store, so, I guess, shrug
The opt out is graphene os yeah?
Not much, as it only works on very few high end phones not sold in most countries. Hopefully their Motorola partnership will expand its availability but I'm not confident that'll happen anytime soon.
Sadly forget about it - GrapheneOS will only work on Motorola __flagship__ devices, and most of their budget phones are not even made by Motorola, but rather by the odm such as Tinno, where it's not even possible to unlock the bootloader without exploits.
GrapheneOS will sadly stay unaffordable for many.
Yes, but there are issues.
You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device and losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community. GrapheneOS might not be a big enough community to sustain work on the projects delivered by F-Droid.
>You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device
IME such apps are few and far between. The most trouble I ran into is play store refusing to show apps because they claim the app isn't compatible with the device, but that can be worked around with aurora store.
I think parent is talking about Play Integrity being integrated into banking apps. It's a hit or miss depending on the bank, some will be fine without, some with integrate it but not rely on it to directly refuse login, some will require a lower integrity level, and some will actually require the highest integrity level leading to issues on custom ROMs.
They really aren't. The number of apps requiring Play Integrity grows every day, my own bank's app hasn't worked in years and I've long given up on it, I just use it on a second stock device now.
And Google has an answer to the "just install the APK from somewhere else" workaround, too. Many apps now integrate a check that prevents them from running if they're not properly linked to the Play Store.
> losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community.
For me it seems the opposite - if these "normal" (GMS spyware) Android devices lose the access to F-Droid and it will only be possible to install malware/adware from Google Play, then maybe that will push more people to value unlocking the bootloader..
Better to share how to install apps and alternative app stores instead of fearmongering around very reasonable security measures.
Isnt the title a bit dramatic? I remember reading you can still install apps but you just need to click a few buttons.
In addition to what others have said, it means some developers who were building for Android are going to stop. You can't install an app when someone is obstructed from building it in the first place.
> every Android app developer must register centrally with Google before their software can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: all apps.
> Registration requires:
> Paying a fee to Google
> Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions
> Surrendering your government-issued identification
> Providing evidence of your private signing key
> Listing all current and all future application identifiers
Google is not an entity you can can trust with this.
From TFA:
You left out the crucial bit:
Sounds a bit like trying to transfer my own money to myself at the bank. I.e. it seems designed to prevent old people getting scammed.
That's exactly what this is: Google is trying to prevent tech illiterate users from installing malware.
(Or at least, that's their take on this. You can choose to read between the lines, or not, as to whether they have other motivations also.)
Of course they have other motivations
But for 1 person wanting to run their own software there are hundreds of people with the potential to install malware/crapware/etc
Yes! That is because banking malware is specifically what is being targeted here: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...
To be fair, that's a one time process. You do not need to do that for every app you want to sideload.
The malware issue that the flow is designed to mitigate is a very real problem. Perhaps there is a better way, but it's not immediately clear what that is.
I see zero trouble as long as it requires no additional identification, no additional payment, and no mandatory time limit for the sideloaded apps.
That is, fine by me. I can wait for 24 hours once in a few years when I acquire a new mobile phone.
You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.
Those developers will pay $25 for identity verification and have no issues.
Unless they do something google doesn't like, or trip one of their many automated systems that ban them without recourse. Or they are compelled to revoke a key by a government.
Revocations are for apps being malware and nothing else, much like macOS Gatekeeper (Apple doesn't even revoke certs used by Warez groups to sign cracked apps).
Automated bans can be an issue, but that's an edge case. Google already had the functionality to 'revoke' an app if ordered to do so by a legal authority.
It is much more important to make a real world attack - something that is draining wallets of ordinary people across Thailand/Brazil/SEA in general - harder to achieve. One thing is a political goal of some people in the west, the other is an ordinary person not having the money to feed themselves because a scammer stole it all.
I can't trust Google will keep to that, sorry. Nor can I accept harms being twisted into a further centralised accumulation of power (especially when Google, with all their resources, could likely do much more to prevent these scams than grabbing that power for themselves)
Well, the very good news is that Google is not seeking your trust. You have no say at all. This is the new system, it benefits actual real people over HN commenters and you will just have to deal with it.
Google doesn't have the ability to change the way banking apps work with regards to transferring money from one account to another in Malaysia/Brazil/Thailand. That would be a matter for the national Governments. This is the best approach available.
I'm aware I lack power here, but you seem to be trying to convince me it's a good thing.
It is, because your objectives disregard things that are far more important. Have a nice day.
Drivers license leaks are surging.
Google's identity verification system relies on multiple factors, not solely drivers licensees or other national identity documents.
Why would you do all that to install an app in a device that you own? It's bollocks.
Because grandmas all over the world are getting swindled by scam apps.
Look, I can't locally install a web extension I wrote on an open-source Firefox browser, because security. I have to install a Developer Edition, or get the extension reviewed and signed by Mozilla, for the very same reasons of thwarting scammers. Is this stifling, or is it making my browser not mine? Is anybody making a big deal out of that?
The world we inhabit is not always friendly. It has a ton of determined and sophisticated bad actors, and a lot of people with less technical savvy than you and me. We have to deal with that, instead of being cantankerous.
It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming. Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
F-Droid is not a safer app repository:
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
And most Android banking malware is distributed through unsafe sideload installs (as opposed to much safer Gatekeeper-style installs, which is what is coming) and are fed to victims through complex attacks involving obtaining a victim's personal information and calling them while credibly pretending to be a local authority or a bank representative. You can read about this wherever you get news about cyber crime.
This is a scourge in South East Asia and Google can do some good here. The only cost is whining from non-technical people. Everyone else will go pay $25 or whatever and sign their app.
Play Store being a cesspit is indeed a problem! But it still is making a constant effort to drive away scammers, so scams don't last too long there. Scammers show sleek-looking web pages offering to install an "official app" from their own apk. Or they have an app that clandestinely sideloads another app. This is being curbed.
But it's limited to a one-time action, not encumbered by additional papers or payment. I don't foresee any trouble using F-Droid (which I use a lot) after I have dismissed the scary screens and confirmed that I know what I'm doing.
>It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming.
Because as a reader to this forum, you're probably more tech savvy that the average person. Moreover this type of scam seems to be more common in Asia than the West, see:
https://cdn.economistdatateam.com/videos/cyber-scams/fake-vi...
https://www.economist.com/interactive/asia/2026/04/10/scam-i...
They convince users to download a "government app", grant it accessibility permissions, then use that to take over their phone and drain their bank accounts.
>Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
Where do you draw the line? If you whitelist f-droid, do you have to whitelist third party f-droid repos too? What about other app "stores" like obtanium? Moreover f-droid being less of a "cesspool" is likely because its reach is smaller, not because it has better moderation.
I'm aware of the way the scams work. I'm also aware that scammers tend to be much more motivated to jump through hoops that are put in front them (more so than legitimate users!). Scammers can also talk people through many, many warning signs.
Scammers cannot talk people past a 24 hour wait. This attack is built upon pressure and operates at a scale that makes stealing many identies, building different-enough apps to avoid getting flagged by Google and signing them all non-viable.
>Wait 24 hours
Somehow bank vaults and heroin storage boxes don’t take this long.
This isn't referring to the efforts Google has gone to try to thwart sideloading.
It is another requirement of Google's, where all developers must be registered to them and apps must be signed by them and anything that isn't will be blocked.
From NewPipe : https://github.com/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn?tab=readme-ov-fi...
I wouldn't consider this "a few buttons", it's enough to turn off the less savvy users
Ugh such overreaction. ADB is still a thing. Apple doesn't even have an official command like tool where you can just push an IPA to your phone. Goodness.
For how long will ADB work? Obviously Google doesn't want user to install apps outside of their control
Google doesn't want millions of people to have every cent of their money stolen.
This measure is about making it harder to pull off a specific type of scam that is plaguing South East Asia. No conspiracy.
For actual information on the purpose of this change rather than conspiracies, I refer you to https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...
Since the victims of these scams do not typically own a traditional computer/cannot be pressured to get to one quickly, ADB will remain a thing.
I could still push an app to my phone via adb after this nonsense gets implemented?