Open Letter to Google on Mandatory Developer Registration for App Distribution

My entire point is that education is the opposite of what we have now. That users are not expected to understand or know anything about IT technologies they use. Not the case with cars, recreational and prescription drugs...

> the implied question is: what if we don't allow people to use technology unless they can demonstrate that they understand it?

It's not exactly my point, but in extreme cases, maybe. I genuinely think that nobody has even tried to educate people about computers. Like, have you seen IT classes in schools? Assuming you are lucky enough for the classes to have any content, you will probably get some lessons in Word and Excel. Maybe some programming. Maybe Paint. But actually using the computer? Dangers of the internet, importance of backups, trusting websites, applications and emails? The concept of application and difference between applications and websites? And those technologies are not "developing" like they were 20 years ago, they are probably here to stay.

> is that really something we want to do? this sounds like gatekeeping, elitism, and anti-innovation because if if less people are going to use a technology, then there is less motivation to build it.

And the alternative Google and Apple present is giving them paternalizing control over the most popular computing device. The say over what people can do with their devices. After they made sure that these devices are embedded into our lives. I would much rather we slowed down with innovation for a second and resolved such issues first, because the way I see it, it's literally manipulation (also see: dark patterns).

As for the gatekeeping and etilism - Assuming we want a "computing license" (not necessarily what I'm arguing for), is "driving license" also gatekeeping and etilism? Or maybe some amount of gatekeeping is good?

As for anti-innovation - I genuinely think we might have had just enough innovation in the field and it may be time to slow down a little, take a step back and evaluate the results. And I honestly don't see much innovation in apps/computers/web space besides maybe AI, and governments are already working on regulating that.

> do you think that would have happened if we had required understanding before we let anyone buy a home computer?

Home computers were very harmless before the internet, but that's an aside. Assuming the tech is actually useful, not just slightly more convenient than "traditional" alternatives, then yes, I'm sure it would have still grown to sizes it has grown to today. Maybe a bit slower.

> besides education, i don't know how to approach this issue.

Same, I generally do think this whole situation needs more consideration.

The appeals to people in Southeast Asia being scammed reminds me of a blog by Cory Doctorow last year: Every complex ecosystem has parasites [1]

The gist of it is that technology can be useful, but that usefulness comes with a price: sometimes bad actors are going to commit fraud or other undesirable actions.

As an example, you can reduce the amount of banking app scams to 0% by simply denying any banking apps on phones. But because of banking apps' usefulness we're not going to do that, so there will be some non-zero risk that you will get scammed.

As a technical user I chose Android for its usefulness, accepting that there may be a (minute) chance that I get scammed, but it is a risk I am willing to take, and Google will unilaterally take this choice away from me.

Still, I don't believe Google's security concerns are sincere, so I think I just wasted my time typing all of this

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/