The future of this elegant and proven system was put in jeopardy last month, when Google unilaterally decreed that Android developers everywhere in the world are going to be required to register centrally with Google. In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents[^regid], including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.
That’s hardly enshitification, the USB camera monitor feature is NOT USB video output capability, which remains as a hardware feature on all Xperia phones, it is a proprietary software feature for receiving video output from Sony’s Alpha Cameras into the phone via standard USB-C port, and displaying the camera’s viewfinder feed on the phone. This is exactly the same as what you can do with for example Spacedeck to use your phone or any other Android device as an external monitor for PC, but with Sony’s own proprietary implementation. And Sony’s implementation is exclusive to their professional Alpha series cameras, you could never use your phone as an external monitor of any other device with that feature, which would always require another software to encode the video feed to transmit theough the standard USB-C interface anyway. So it’s been an extremely niche proprietary feature only used by a very small group of people who happen to be professional photographers, doing certain specific types of photography, and happen to be using certain Sony Alpha cameras instead of professional cameras from other vendors. I agree it’s a ridiculous and beyond stupid decision from Sony but I do also think it’s a bit of a stretch to call that enshitification, especially compares to the kind of practices from many other much bigger OEMs that have unfortunately become almost ubiquitous these days throughout an entire industry.
While at the same time, Sony Xperia phones remains some of the very few high end Android phones these days that still have BOTH 3.5mm headphones jack and SD card support, together with an open device policy where you’re always free to unlock bootloader and root without artificially losing major core OS features.