The purpose of this “verification” bullshit is to prevent piracy and adblocking via patching apks. So there will be a restriction that a given application can only be associated with one developer account (and verified at install time via apk’s signature).
Theoretically F-Droid could also change app ids when building apps which will allow them to be registered to F-Droid’s dev account but Google will likely frown upon that. There will probably be some clause against “impersonation” in their rules (Play Store rules already technically prohibit forks of open source apps, though it’s rarely enforced).
There will be apps Google will frown upon too like newpipe. I’d rather F-droid not even bother with trying to comply and register with Google, and just have it so either it works normally for Custom Rom users and other people can rely on adb installs.
I feel that the only way out is gonna be using the debug account (ie. the one with the public “androiddebugkey” keyAlias, which the SDK uses for development builds), as this seems to be the only possibility Google is still allowing.
This has the side effect that devs that want to remain Google-independent can no longer rely on the built-in protections in Android which prevents an app from being updated if it hasn’t been signed with the same credentials… but well, that seems to be the only road Google is allowing for anyone who does not wanna register with them.
I mean… the other alternative would be to, essentially, fork Android / expect a custom AOSP to be installed… which might not be an option for all hardware out there.
The purpose of this “verification” bullshit is to prevent piracy and adblocking via patching apks. So there will be a restriction that a given application can only be associated with one developer account (and verified at install time via apk’s signature).
Theoretically F-Droid could also change app ids when building apps which will allow them to be registered to F-Droid’s dev account but Google will likely frown upon that. There will probably be some clause against “impersonation” in their rules (Play Store rules already technically prohibit forks of open source apps, though it’s rarely enforced).
There will be apps Google will frown upon too like newpipe. I’d rather F-droid not even bother with trying to comply and register with Google, and just have it so either it works normally for Custom Rom users and other people can rely on adb installs.
I feel that the only way out is gonna be using the debug account (ie. the one with the public “androiddebugkey”
keyAlias, which the SDK uses for development builds), as this seems to be the only possibility Google is still allowing.This has the side effect that devs that want to remain Google-independent can no longer rely on the built-in protections in Android which prevents an app from being updated if it hasn’t been signed with the same credentials… but well, that seems to be the only road Google is allowing for anyone who does not wanna register with them.
I mean… the other alternative would be to, essentially, fork Android / expect a custom AOSP to be installed… which might not be an option for all hardware out there.