Software developer used to be one of the most 'free' professions. But now you need a stamp of approval from some corporation to get through the day, even if you are nominally independent. And woe to you if they should ever revoke your license to feed yourself. Because 'verified developer' is just another way to say 'not a threat to Google or Google's corporate image'.
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
#712This truly sucks, since in this day and age we need unmodified phones for banking apps (and I think for oncall my company requires Android/iOS as well). I guess this will be the final push for me to change to iOS, since I already have a bunch of Apple stuff otherwise, and I was holding out on the phone side for this exact feature.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#713The funny thing is Stallman started his fight like half a century ago and on regular days Hacker News shits on him eating something off of his foot and not being polished and diplomatic, and loves practical aspects of Corporate Open Source and gratis goodies and doesn't particularly care about Free Software. On this day suddenly folks come out of the woodwork advocating for half baked measures to achieve what Stallma…
There are people who have been pretty steady in their convictions over decades. Not that we have much illusions about the end game. Stallman has issues, but they're minor compared to the issues that the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft have. But they get to hide their nasty little habits behind the corporate veil of respectability.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#714Every 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
Root access on your phone isn't enough: there's layers below root.
This. But being able to get root is a very good starting point.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#715The funny thing is Stallman started his fight like half a century ago and on regular days Hacker News shits on him eating something off of his foot and not being polished and diplomatic, and loves practical aspects of Corporate Open Source and gratis goodies and doesn't particularly care about Free Software. On this day suddenly folks come out of the woodwork advocating for half baked measures to achieve what Stallma…
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I can understand Defending bad people. He is railing against freedom of injustice. I understand being abusive. He is feeling hopeless. I haven’t seen Harassment so I don’t know what to make of it.
He seems to walk the path of purity of ideas. And may come off as aggressive. As a by product, he may also be aloof from the career ladder. His trust in being nice to people is broken (autism?).
He has some good civil rights stuff https://www.stallman.org/
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#716That was one of the last reasons I had an android phone for.
Switch to Iphone now? Maybe the in crowd will like me now.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#717Time for Linux phones with Android emulation
I've been working (slowly, due to lack of time) on running VMs with Waydroid inside of Linux Phones.
Sadly, I haven't found any resources to running a _regular_ Android VM on Linux. The few resources focused on that use x86_64, which is not reasonable for a Linux phone.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#718The Play Store is full of certified verified malware. How is this going to help? This is all about control...
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#719Every 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
Conditioning such rights on the device being "owned outright" will just push the same bad actors to rent you the phones instead of buying them, the same as they did with software licenses. The only way to really fix it is to break up the wealth and power of individuals and corporations based on their total effective power, regardless of the source from which that power is derived.
>The only way to really fix it is to break up the wealth and power of individuals and corporations based on their total effective power
That simply transfers the power to the one doing the breakup, which in most cases, are the Governments, which are notoriously known to invade user's privacy under the guise of protection of children or whatever.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#720So that's it then. If this actually goes through, there will be no option in the mobile OS market for an OS that both: a) allows the installation of apps without any contractual relationship with any party, and b) allows the use of mainstream and secure apps like banking
I'll just have to disable it and choose a banking app that works on the browser. Tonnes of my apps are sideloaded. Quite a few are on the playstore or the dev might upload their details.
How will you login to the banking app in the browser without a locked down phone? In Germany, MFA is enforced and with many banks the only allowed second factor is an app on a phone.