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.
What the FUCK F-Droid. Why would you close your doors?!?
This change would literally have no effect on many of your developers and many of your users.
Just because someone writes Android software or runs Android apps doesn’t mean they need to distribute apps on google play or install gapps
Did you not read what they were saying? They don’t want to, they would HAVE to.
That’s misinformation. Downstream OSes don’t include gapps, by default
Not sure why you’re all through this thread trying to defend google, but the entire point of why google is doing this is to close both sides of app installation- AOSP support is getting deprioritized/dropped, meaning there won’t BE downstream OSes, and then they’re trying to lock development behind Google’s approval, blocking non-gapps stores from being able to be installed on Google’s OS.
I assume google will make it impossible to sideload unless its a google authorized dev
They can’t if you degoogle your phone. That’s my point.
Anyone who reinstalls their OS doesn’t have Google (by default). It’s an additional step to add their binary spyware crap
They have stopped open sourcing parts of android I think I heard, so its going to get tougher for non google android devs to build for hardware. ( I’m running GrapheneOS )