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.
Yes I agree that in terms of a financial service, tokenized transaction system indeed architecturally guarentees greater safety, but a bigger concern is the provider of this service.
Did you not hear about what happened recently when a certain major payment processor realized they can arbitrarily enforce what they think other people should and should not be able to buy, by withholding the availability of such service? Well functionally the exact same thing is happening to you, Google doesn’t want you to be able to control your own devices because Google is an advertising company who also profits from selling your data, annnnd Google also happens to be the commerical supplier of Android with their commerical GMS certification program which includes Play Integrity check and all that, so they can arbitrarily decide that if you attempt to have more control over your own device, you don’t get to use Google Wallet anymore.
Are you happy to submit to this mafia practice from Google? I wouldn’t lol. Not saying I have a solution but then again I don’t think any single individual could possibly have a solution to the disaster that is the US capitalism.