Please consider using GrapheneOS. If it gets more momentum and users it's the only option pushing back at these tactics.
Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
891–900 of 1001 posts
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#892Please consider using GrapheneOS. If it gets more momentum and users it's the only option pushing back at these tactics.
GrapheneOS only supports Google Devices, are you serious?
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#893The 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…
No, I hate this change from Google, and everyone involved with it should be ashamed of themselves, but Stallman is an extremest and I don't believe his world would be better than this one.
There's genuine need for application developers to gain access to extremely secure end-to-end attestation of the environment their apps are running in. Its a rare need, but it does exist. There's also genuine need for some consumers to opt-in to a strict security regime.
Google's change forces this draconian, dishonorable regime on all application developers and on all users. Its a change that serves no one except their shareholders.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#894>Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices.
It's annoying combined with them making that much harder to be a verified developer. I had an android dev account for years and published an app when it was $20 for life but now there's a bunch of hassle involved. If they had the old $20 and upload your passport to prove id it wouldn't be so bad.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#895The 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…
[flagged]
Stallman was smeared for being uncompromisingly rigorous and objective:
https://stallmansupport.org/explaining-events-that-led-to-st...
It was all witch hunt from there.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#896Considering that Android 5 devices are still alive and well, it will take another 10 years for google to catch up. Hoping in that time Linux based true open source mobile operating systems will make some headway. Another alternative might be PWAs (progressive web apps), that one can "install" on your homescreen, but they could be axed next.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#897The 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…
It's a sad state of affairs when a guy born in 1953 and a 70+ years old is our reference for freedom. What happened to GenX, Millenials and GenZ ? Why aren't there any more vocal activists doing something? The internet fuked us up. We're full of armchair experts "fighting" the cause laying in our coach.
Millenials here. We did. A lot of a lot. And nobody cared.
Even today on HN most use chrome instead of firefox and mac instead of linux and. If you can't even convince the biggest nerds that supporting alternatives is important, what chances do you have?
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#898As much as people are making this out to be a Google thing, I think this is more about the security requirements many countries are imposing.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#899I think time quickly approaches when everyone will have one mobile phone for "banking/crypto" and the other for everything else. Samsung used to have a very cool feature on their phones (perhaps they still do, I switched away from the galaxy line). It was called Knox and was basically containers for your apps. Unfortunately it was limited to only one secure container. What I did was I had all my secure apps outside t…
Interesting. I've never really thought much about Samsung phones because I always felt that they were really full of bloatware and features that seemed to distract more than present usefulness.
Knox sounds like a pretty awesome feature though.
I use `nix-on-droid` on a Pixel 9 running stock Android 16. It provides me with a nix shell that gives me ZSH, Starship prompt, NeoVim, w3m, ssh, alpine, Claude-code, Circumflex (TUI HackerNews Client) and just about anything else I want from the Nix packages ecosystem. I even have NUR ( Nix User Repositories) set up. I daily drive NixOS for work and for Pleasure. It's the most advanced operating system I've ever encountered. I can't wax enough praise.
The closest thing to a truly open source, fully functional and daily used mobile that I ever had was the Nokia N900. Man how I miss that thing. Maemo was Nokia's original Linux-based mobile OS, which ran on the N900/950.
MeeGo was created when Nokia merged Maemo with Intel's Moblin project around 2010. It was supposed to be the future of Nokia smartphones, but Nokia abandoned it in 2011 when they switched to Windows Phone as their primary smartphone platform. Idiots.
Mer was created as an open-source continuation of MeeGo after Nokia dropped it.
Sailfish OS was then built on top of Mer by Jolla, a company founded by former Nokia employees who had worked on MeeGo.
Jolla launched in 2013 with the goal of continuing the Linux mobile vision that Nokia had abandoned. They make phones and tablets.
Re: Google will allow only apps from verified developers to be installed on Android
#900Everybody DEMANDS Google "do something" about malware, scam and fake apps. So it does. For an average Joe and Jane, who gets their money stolen, that's a good move. They don't care about technology, they just want their bank, instagram, cat pictures and video calls to work and not get scammed. They are often lured into installing scamware through exactly sideloading APK, completely unaware of the risks. In the articl…
> Everybody DEMANDS Google "do something" about malware, scam and fake apps. So it does.
Which Google department are you at? Some good stuff you've convinced yourself of here. My social circle is 99% normies, not once of them has ever brought this up. Normie news doesn't bring it up. You do though, to justify yourself.