181–190 of 1001 posts
Microsoft would love to do that too, but it just has too much of legacy software to introduce such a major hurdle.
> NSA: Linux Journal is an "extremist forum" and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance [0]
Looks like this is a part of the move toward Chat Control and ending E2E encryption.
[0] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extre...
> You shouldn’t have to choose between open and secure
2+2=5
Truly the end of an era. I've spent nearly two decades buying Android phones because of a single checkbox in settings that let me have the freedom I consider essential to any computing device that I own.
In a way, it's liberating, I've missed out on a lot from the Apple ecosystem because of that checkbox. Maybe finally I can let go of it now the choice is out of my hands.
[0] https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...
Even aside from the privacy implications (which aren't trivial themselves,) Doesn't this make it prohibitively difficult to do local builds of open source projects? It's been a long time since I've done this, but my recollection was that the process to do this was essentially you would build someone else's (the project's) package/namespace up through signing, but sign it locally with your own dev keys. A glance at th…
A repo is just files in a directory, so the namespace can be changed, but the whole thing stinks. Having to setup Android signing keys and needing to provide ID is not fun. It means you won't easily be able to run builds on Google certified Android devices that aren't from "approved" people.
I predict Windows will end up going this route before Google backtracks on it. This is the future; partially fuelled by malware, partially fuelled by the desire for platform control, and partially fuelled by government regulation.
This is how macOS works, without a signature they will tell you they can't guarantee it doesn't have malware and you need to go to settings and choose to run anyway (and most people don't even know about it). Microsoft would love to do that too, but it just has too much of legacy software to introduce such a major hurdle.
I never really got into "phone" progrmaming, always waiting for the shenanigans to die down. But somehow the shanigans have gotten worse and for a significant chunk of the world population, the phone is the only computation device they have at all.
so much extra work involved that isn't building the app.
I worry how this will affect fdroid etc.
They have the ecosystem by the balls. Phone manufacturers in recent years have been making unlocking & modifying their devices more and more difficult, google and app developers have been cracking down harder on modded devices by implementing TPM equivalents in the hardware to sign and verify that your system is a google-appproved one, and alternatives still are decades behind in terms of app ecosystem. I think they…
That's if they're available at all. In my country, only cell phones certified by the telecommunications government agency (ANATEL) can be imported, so the alternatives (Jolla, PinePhone, Fairphone) simply don't exist.
I cannot resist the urge to point out that we wouldn't have had this problem if people actually sticked to free software instead of "commercial use friendly" open source licensing
I never really got into "phone" progrmaming, always waiting for the shenanigans to die down. But somehow the shanigans have gotten worse and for a significant chunk of the world population, the phone is the only computation device they have at all.
I never got into it because I was convinced developers would refuse to give up control over distribution when Apple started doing it. I wish I was right, but here we are.