While my confidence is usually pretty low with random repos, I am fairly sure there are more malware on the playstore than there are as .apk on github.
Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
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Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#652This is really bad. I think that most people on HN will agree with that. The problem is that most normal people (HN is not normal - mostly for the better) don't even understand what sideloading is - let alone actually care . How can we fix this? (aside from making people care - apathy enables so many political problems in the current age, but it's such a huge problem that this definitely isn't going to be the impetus…
This certainly won't solve the problem, but I would at least like to banish the term "side load", which is a kind of Orwellian word that takes something everyone used to do all the time and makes it sound obscure and a bit nefarious. Maybe we, the tech literate, can start calling sideloading a "free install" or something. When asked, we can clarify that the 'free' stands for both freedom, and not paying middlemen 30%…
I really don't understand this war on language that is so prevalent in tech circles. There's a bunch of these like switching git branches from "master" to "main" or "blacklist"/"whitelist" to "allowlist"/"denylist" and I have yet to see a single problem that all of this term shuffling has actually solved.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#653Extremely retarded. "Think of the children" all over again in the guise of "Think of the misinformation" when this is all just some kind of easy way to get rid of apps like newpipe.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#654I think it would be ok if it was not for the fact that Google will most likely abuse it for other purposes like locking out indie developers even more.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#655This is a result of the current tech being filled with dark design patterns. Tech is designed to be addictive, indispensable, indisputable, mandatory. And at the same time complex, hard, difficult, risky.
We are so used to tech as it is that it is simple to force these bad decisions for the greater good. Because everyone is sure there is no alternative. There’s no other way to design tech, it will always be so complex and powerful that gov and corps can onesidedly decide what is best for the rest of the world.
This might be an area where local AI excels, when ready. No apps. No sharing of personal data. One AI capable of doing what most software does, on the fly, without relying on others to decide what is ok. Remains to be solved who can create and distribute this local AI and whether hardware will be allowed to run “untrusted” AI…
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#656Fuck google for this. Awful decision. Guaranteed to be abused when Google or government despots decide that certain apps (or developers) aren't aligned with their interests.
Feeling very frustrated with the way the internet is going lately. This plus OSA + chat control. And compounded by the imperative for AI companies to keep hoovering up any and all data they can get their hands on, wiring it into "agentic" workflows and such.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#657I always wonder, who are the developers doing this? don't they feel bad about going through with these changes or do they fool themselves thinking it's the right thing? is it greed? many other fields have an explicit or implicit ethics code which we seem to lack. I'm thinking about other fields like medicine, engineering, etc. Probably since the entry level to development is low and anyone can do it, it means there's…
What makes you so sure that such a hypothetical code of ethics would promote user freedom? I think it far more likely that protecting the user from harm (i.e., not allowing the user to install malware) would appear in that code.
Philosophers have been arguing about morality and ethics for thousands of years, and are no closer to consensus than they have ever been. The idea that 'I should be allowed to do whatever I want with computing machinery that I have bought' is a political choice, and because only a very small proportion is able to exercise that belief or even understand what it means, it is highly susceptible to being discarded in favour of beliefs like 'do whatever it takes to get the scammers off the internet'.
> The usual answer that their livelyhoods depend on it is simplistic, these are the best paid developers in the US, pretty sure they have some sway power.
You think that Google's best and brightest are working on the Google Play store?
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#658Every day we stray farther from the premise that we should be allowed to install / modify software on the computers we own. Will once again re-up the concept of a “right to root access”, to prevent big corps from pulling this bs over and over again: https://medhir.com/blog/right-to-root-access
Very true and this was predictable. That said, I haven't installed any apps for months now since I don't consider Android to be a usable OS anymore. It could be technically, but I have no will to fight Google and manufacturers on their lock down ambitions.
Ironically that degraded phones to be just that. Phones with build-in high quality cameras. For everything else there are better alternatives.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#659This deplorable company has just condemned humanity's right to open computing. They sold themselves as open, smothered out all other open competitors, and then once they had complete dominance over the open phone market did this.
Even if Google backtracks now. Governments will latch on to this idea just like they have with client side content scanning. This will never go away. Thank you google you despicable pieces of shit.
What now? Where do we go from here?
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#660So much for people preaching Android as an alternative to Apple's walled garden. Enshittification advances apace.