Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

keepandroidopen.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 392 posts

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#191

Post by bigstrat2003 »

sheiyei wrote: post #182
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a false equivalence at all. Both situations are taking away someone's control of something that they own, borne from a paternalistic desire to protect that person from themselves. If one is acceptable, the other should be. Conversely if one is unacceptable, the other should be unacceptable as well. Either paternalistic refusal to let people do as they wish is ok, or it isn't.

Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves. That should be obvious from the fact that very intelligent and technologically literate people too can fall for phishing attacks. Tell me for example, how many people in your life know how a bank would ACTUALLY contact you about a suspected hijacking and what the process should look like? And how about any of the dozens of other cover stories used? No…

> Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves.

That is where we differ. It is, ultimately, the victim of a scam who makes the choice of "yes, this person is trustworthy and I will do what they say". The only way to prevent that is to block the user from having the power to make that decision, which is to say protecting them from themselves.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#192

Post by iamnothere »

nmeagent wrote: post #186
bitwize wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it extends to PCs. It'd suck for us, but end users, software vendors, content providers, and service providers all benefit from a more restricted platform that can provide certain guarantees against malware, fraud, piracy, and so forth. It's pathologically programmer-brained to assume that the good old days of being able to run arbitrary code on a networked computing device would last forever. That freedom…

> That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly. No, no, a thousand times no. This is an argument for authoritarian clampdown on general computing and must be opposed by all means necessary. I have the right…

Safety fascists won’t stop until every human interaction requires permission.

It’s a good time to buy a pallet of old SFF computers, just in case.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#193

Post by bigstrat2003 »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #174
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a false equivalence at all. Both situations are taking away someone's control of something that they own, borne from a paternalistic desire to protect that person from themselves. If one is acceptable, the other should be. Conversely if one is unacceptable, the other should be unacceptable as well. Either paternalistic refusal to let people do as they wish is ok, or it isn't.

Maybe not, but I think that overextending any idea like that in the opposite direction of whatever point you are trying to make at least devolves into a "slippery slope" argument. For instance, is your point that all security on phones that impede freedom of the user (for instance, HTTPS, forced password on initial startup, not allowing apps to access certain parts of the phone without user permissions, verifying boo…

No, that's not my point at all. Measures such as that are a tool which is in the hands of the user. There is a default restriction which is good enough for most cases, but the user has the ability to open things up further if he needs. What Google is proposing takes control out of the user's hands and makes Google the sole arbiter of what is and is not allowed on the device.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#194

Post by pas »

philistine wrote: post #181
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. We try to educate people about scams. We give them warnings that what they are doing can be dangerous if misused. If they choose to ignore those things and proceed anyway, the only further step society could take is to take away the person's freedom to choose. And that is an unacceptable solution.

> The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. Nope. We could, for example, ask developers to register with their legal identity to release apps.

the open source community should ask for their own install key and that's it

Play store can be fast and verification based and the F/OSS stores can be slower, reputation and review based.

...

But fundamentally the easiest thing is to ask people to pay to unlock the phone's security barriers, this makes it harder and costlier for scammers.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#195

Post by bigstrat2003 »

crazygringo wrote: post #167
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I agree that mandatory developer registration feels too heavy handed, but I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is." Why would the community give a different response? Everything is fine as it is. Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom. That is a fundamental truth of the world. At some point you need to treat people as adul…

> Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom. So... no food and safety regulations, because life is not safe, and people should have the freedom to poison food with cheaper, lethal ingredients because their freedom matters more? You're right that things can't be made more safe without taking away the freedom to harm people. Which is why even the most freedom-loving countries on earth strike…

Your post is addressing a strawman, not what I said. But to answer the words you so ungraciously put in my mouth:

> So... no food and safety regulations, because life is not safe, and people should have the freedom to poison food with cheaper, lethal ingredients because their freedom matters more?

This is harm to others and is very obviously something we should enforce. There are unreasonable laws about food (banning the sale of raw milk cheese for example, which most of the world enjoys with perfect safety), but by and large they are unobjectionable.

> You're right that things can't be made more safe without taking away the freedom to harm people. Which is why even the most freedom-loving countries on earth strike a balance.

I never said I was opposed to striking a balance. Of course we can strike a balance. Indeed we already have when it comes to installing apps on Android. But these measures are being advanced as if safety were the only consideration, which it isn't.

> You're taking the most extreme libertarian stance possible.

No, that is what you have projected onto me. That's not actually what my stance is.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#197

Post by criddell »

aftergibson wrote: post #160
criddell wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with mandatory developer registration, is that it gives Google and Governments the ability to veto apps. Don't they already have that power?

No judgement whatsoever, but for almost everyone they too will think, no big deal you only install software through stores right? Nothing changes for them, in fact they can't conceive of an alternative anymore.

That's true.

How can you judge if Google's plan is a good one? Add up the harms caused by the new rules and weigh that against the reduction in harm and see where the balance is?

I have a hard time believing the net outcome for the overall Android community would be negative.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#198

Post by pas »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #67
dfabulich wrote: post #3

The most controversial claim in this letter is in the section that "Existing Measures Are Sufficient." In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de... > For example, a common attack we track in Southeast Asia illustrates this threat clearly. A scammer calls a victim claiming their bank account is compromised and uses…

> I agree that mandatory developer registration feels too heavy handed, but I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is." Why would the community give a different response? Everything is fine as it is. Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom. That is a fundamental truth of the world. At some point you need to treat people as adul…

If those bad decisions have a lot of higher order effects and they turn out to be very costly for society, then limiting freedom seems worth it.

And it seems Google thinks society is beginning to unravel in SEA due to scammers. Trust breaks down, people stop using phones to do important things, GDP can shrink, banks go back to cheques, trees will be cut down!!

It's bad to let people go and catch the zombie virus and the come back and spread it, right?

...

I don't like it, but the obvious decision is to set up a parallel authority that can issue certificates to developers (for side loading), so we don't have to trust Google. Let the developer community manage this. And if we can't then Google can revoke the intermediary CA. And of course Google and other manufacturers could sell development devices that are unlocked, etc.

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#199

Post by [deleted] »

pas wrote: post #173
hbn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can add 5 layers of "are you sure you want to do this unsafe thing" and it just adds 5 easy steps to the scam where they say "agree to the annoying popup"

then make the unlock cost money relatively easy for devs, but hard to scale for scammers

[deleted]

Re: Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

#200

Post by AlotOfReading »

umairnadeem123 wrote: post #196

[dead]

Why is that an acceptable middle ground for you? I trust f-droid apps a lot more than anything installed from the Play store. The same restrictions should apply to Google's store as others.
Post reply on HN