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…
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.
Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
361–370 of 1001 posts
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#362At 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…
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
no way will they go back to coin-operated. That would mean they have to pay employees to walk up and down to collect coins.
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#364At 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…
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…
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/…
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 a…
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.
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 (pa…
> 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-con…
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#368Welp, 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…
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.
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#369As 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 differ…
As an idea, what about letting me install on my own device whatever I want? 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?
Re: Google details new 24-hour process to sideload unverified Android apps
#370At 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…
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.