The fundamental problem is that we are relying on the good graces of Google to keep Android open, despite the fact that it often runs run contrary to their goals as a $4T for-profit behemoth. This may have worked in the past, but the "don't be evil" days are very far behind us.
I don't see a real future for Andrioid as an open platform unless the community comes together and does a hard fork. Google can continue to develop their version and go the Apple way (which, funny enough, no one has a problem with). Development of AOSP can be controlled by a software foundation, like tons of other successful projects.
It is a disgrace how Google has managed this situation.
To recap the storyline, as far as I understand it: last August, Google announced plans to heavily restrict sideloading. Following community pushback, they promised an "advanced flow" for power users. The media widely reported this as a walk-back, leading users to assume the open ecosystem was safe.
But this promised feature hasn't appeared in any Android 16 or 17 betas. Google is quietly proceeding with the original lockdown.
The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using). If installing a basic APK eventually requires a Google-verified developer ID, maintaining a truly de-Googled mobile OS becomes nearly impossible.
I contacted the EU DMA team about my concerns and got a real reply within 24 hours. Not just an automated message, it looked like a real human read my message and wrote a reply. I'd urge other EU citizens to do the same.
Great idea, I just did the same. I encourage other EU citizens to do the same. Keeping at least one of the two major mobile ecosystems open is important.
(And install GrapheneOS, the more successful open Android becomes, the better.)
For posterity, what was their sentiment?
Just to put out what Google actually said in their blog post [0]:
> We appreciate the community's engagement and have heard the early feedback – specifically from students and hobbyists who need an accessible path to learn, and from power users who are more comfortable with security risks. We are making changes to address the needs of both groups.
> We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.
> Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months.
It is also true that they have not updated their developer documentation site and still assert that developer verification will be "required" in September 2026 [1]. Which might be true by some nonsensical definition of "required" if installing unverified apps requires an "advanced flow", but let's not give too much benefit of the doubt here.
0: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
> We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements.
In classic Google fashion, they hear the complaint, pretend that it's about something else, and give a half baked solution to that different problem that was not the actual issue. Any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.
I think you've omitted the next section, which seems more relevant. It seems like they will still allow installs, just hide it behind some scare text. Seems reasonable?
No, because it isn't something that should be up to google's control.
> Why not? It's their operating system
It's my phone.
> We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands.
I've lived through them locking down a11y settings "to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer", and it's a nightmare. It's not just some scare text, it's a convoluted process that explicitly prevents you from just opening the settings and allowing access. I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt; after they actually show what their supposed solution is we can discuss it, but precedent is against them.
> Seems reasonable?
No. As I said before, any solution that disadvantages F-Droid compared to the less trustworthy Google Play is a problem.
It's deliberately written to be vague and not say anything, and given the original intention, it's hard to believe that means it should be interpreted generously.
> shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists.
Even that is a step too far in the wrong direction. Doesn't matter if it's free, or whatever, simply requiring an account at all to create and run software on your own device (or make it available to others) is wrong.
There exists no freedom when you are required to verify your identity, or even just provide any personal information whatsoever, to a company to run software on your device that you own.
So basically the Apple model but worse.
This isnt going to be a popular post because the HN crowd is very much a "China bad" crowd but I hypothesize China will likely step in and offer a fork that's compatible with open ecosystems not under the direct control of the us state department. This might be in the form of commits and investment in fdroid and pinephone, or a tiktok like alternative to the wests walled garden.
Edit: this will likely exist "uncensored" in other markets but conform to the PRCs standards and practices domestically, similarly to how tiktok operated prior to selling a version specifically taylored to US censorship and propaganda.
Not a chance. A fork that is under China's control, maybe, but not an "open" fork. They don't even pretend to have that as a value.
You may theoretically find it advantageous to use such a system anyhow. To a first-order approximation, the danger a government poses to you is proportional to its proximity to you. (In the interests of fairness, I will point out, so are the benefits a government may offer to you. In this case it just happens to be the dangers we are discussing.) Using the stack of a government based many thousands of miles/kilometers away from you may solve a problem for you, if you judge they are much less likely to use it against you than your local government.
But China certainly won't put out an "open" anything.
Not sure if you have been following the LLM space or even the emulator handhelds space, but Chinese companies have been doing great with putting out open source software lately.
Pinephone is tragic, bought a bunch of Pine64's devices (PP, PPP, PB, PBuds, arm tablet, eInk tablet) but old tech, missing drivers, can't blame em no money no drivers... Still the community on Discord is great/helpful people.
That'd be great but I'm not feeling like the Chinese market is too worried about open development. I got a Huawei Watch 5 as a gift and I liked it enough to try to develop my own apps (their app store is a wasteland) but to my surprise Harmony OS is not Android compatible (just Android based somehow). The watch's developer mode is useless. Trying to register a developer account is almost impossible and it seems they only allow chinese nationals and there's no plan to open registration. I couldn't even download their custom IDE (something like Android Studio) without an account.
Maybe it's just my experience.
I would rather put my phone in the microwave than run Chinese Communist Party OS.
Half, or more, of the world thinks exactly the same in regards to the US
If 50% of the world started running the CCP backed fork and 50% of the world ran the US backed fork, which one would you choose for your phone?
If there were truly no other choice, CCP without a doubt. At least they claim to have good intentions, whether that's true or not
Whatever one that lets me install what I want
Meanwhile the NSA and Mossad can see you fapping on your phone and scan your face in real time and you're implicitly fine with it
This is what lack of options does to a MF
Yeah, I’m amazed at how far the western surveillance apparatus has been able to coast on plausible deniability. Folks, please don’t stick your head in the sand domestically just because there’s an even more obvious or egregious example abroad.
Say it with me: “Living in a police state is bad no matter who’s running it”.
This made me laugh cause of how true it is.
Nah, that can't be true. Just imagine the traffic peak the first day after NNN if they're streaming from your phone in real time.
We ("you") have no power to keep android open. Unfortunately it is in the hands of a company that is building it for profit, in a way or the other.
It's been our choice to drink this glass of wishful thinking while giving that company a solid dominant position in the market.
We ("you") can only make choices that will overturn that trend.
Fully opensource hardware with fully opensource software? Maybe, but also this is wishful thinking.
It's also heavily influenced by businesses. Most employers will happily hand you an Apple or Android phone for work, but I don't think there is a single company out there that would dare to hand normal people an Ubuntu Touch based phone.
We (people who live in a country/confederacy with working antitrust laws) have power to keep large companies from anticompetitive practices such as this one.
If they close things up with no alternative, the free open source software will likely start to catch up. it will take a few years though. This could be a blessing in disguise.
There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company. And before you say something along the lines of, "But they don't need to compete, they just need to be good enough", that still requires business to put their apps on some open source app store and make them compatible with the open source OS, and there is close to zero incentive for them to do so.
Somehow, Stallman returned.
The judge told Google that Apple is not anti-competitive because Apple has no competitors on it's platform (this all stemming from the Epic lawsuits).
Google listened.
Blame the judge for one of the worst legal calls in recent history. Google is a monopoly and Apple is not. Simple fix for Google...
I would caution the decision makers on this. The line between a secure device and a useless toy is perforated and hard to see.
If I can't use banking or my NFC wallets on my phone, it has become 90% useless. The other 10% of usefulness is texting and calls, which every other phone can do.
Unfortunately, this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem.
90% of your usage on your phone is banking apps or NFC payments? That seems hard to believe.
I don't know if it is generational or regional or what, but there is a solid segment of people that live in very close contact with their bank.
That's pretty much my usage pattern too, including some group texting, the occasional call and sometimes taking photos/videos. Otherwise my phone pretty much stays in my pocket or on my table the entire day. What are you using your phone for that makes that so unbelievable?
I used my bank app yesterday, but since then I've used:
whatsapp, phone, push authenticator, safari (having followed a link from a message), spotify, slack, mail, calandar, disney plus and camera
Do you not do any of that on a mobile device?
Web browsing (like right now), photos, e-books, lots of messaging, music, sometimes video.
I use NFC payments often, but I wouldn't say that amounts to more than a few percent of my total usage.
Everyone uses their phones differently, of course. I don't think your use is unbelievable or odd, but I do think your use patterns are not the common case.
I run Graphene on my Pixel and banking apps just work. There is no Google Pay, obviously, since Google dependencies have been stripped out from the system. I just carry a credit card.
Even with the sandboxed Play Store, Google Pay disables NFC payments as it requires hardware attestation against Google's root keys.
No inherent reason all that stuff can't work on an open platform. It works just fine on my Linux box with yubikeys, fido2, and smart cards. Gcloud even let's you authenticate with them only to put a medium lived token in plaintext into a sqlite file on disk.
Curve pay works!
No idea why you are even bringing this up. It works just fine right now.
It verifiably does not on open source and free android roms like Graphene. Unsure where you're getting your info.
The ability to install signed and unsigned APKs directly correlates to the financial institution policy regarding mobile devices and banking apps. Unsure how you've separated these two.
For me, the showstopper would be NFC payments. From what I understand, Google Pay doesn't work on Graphene. I have all my credit cards in GPay, as well as a transit card. I use it for boarding passes when I fly, and any other tickets/passes that support it, since it tends to be much more reliable than the airline or ticketer's app. I've come to heavily rely on it, unfortunately.
>this mostly means using the closed android ecosystem
Maybe, but there's no technical reason for this. As I've mentioned before, I can do banking just fine on my Gentoo machine where the entire corpus of software on it, is FOSS and compiled by myself.
To you.
Laptops exist.
This is a common answer but it does not apply to at least most of Europe. Because of regulations most banks require to install their app either on iOS or Android to act as a 2FA device. One of my banks gave me a hardware device 20 years ago. When its battery dies I'll have to use their app and my fingerprint.
When I was still rooting it was possible to bypass this on a rooted device with enough effort. It wasn't unsecure either. Padentic corporate security doesn't really make us more secure. Just more lazy.
Have you talked or met anyone born after the 90s? Everyone banks on their phone, it's the norm not the exception.
Edit: Someone also made a good point, one of my CC's I can barely even manage without the app since the website barely works.
The link is to the f-droid blog. The official "Keep Android Open" site is at https://keepandroidopen.org/, and contains good information on how you can contribute by contacting regulators.
>F-Droid Basic Great, now they can spread themselves even thinner. Just revert the entire trash rewrite from years ago. Problem solved
The Control Society is way lamer than I could have imagined. Deleuze! I demand a refund!
> We see a battle of PR campaigns and whomever has the last post out remains in the media memory as the truth
You must find truth. Lies will find you.
Android was never open. User apps are limited, only system apps can do X which means third party apps can't compete with Google and this is not a coincidence.
Let's focus on making it possible to use really open Linux systems on smartphones.
There are some functionality limited to google play services, but it really is not too much in my opinion.
The amount of open stuff that was migrated into the Play Services closed source blob over the years just keeps growing.
Capitalism is the privatization of human needs. As long as these tech platforms are owned privately they will be used to police and make money.
This view NEEDS to be central to the tech freedom rhetoric, else the whole movement is literally just begging politicians and hoping corporations do the right thing... useless.
From a marketing standpoint it seems like a baffling decision on Google's part.
I own a Pixel and while the hardware seems decent, I've had a buggy and annoying experience with Android, and it's been getting worse lately.
Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good. That's like Microsoft thinking people use Teams because of its merits.
People buy Android phones because they can be had cheaper than an equivalent iPhone and because in spite of the buggy and inconsistent mess of an OS, you aren't beholden to Apple's regimented UX. Locking down Android will not give it a "premium experience"... It'll always just be "Temu iOS" at best.
Have you considered Graphene since you own a Pixel? It's a huge upgrade over the stock OS in terms of security, privacy and general reduction of bloat.
Yep it's definitely on my list but my Pixel is on its last legs and I'm considering going back to iOS.
I urge you not too. iOS is fully locked down -- Apple won't allow you to exert control over the hardware that you bought and own, it's shocking.
> "Temu iOS"
Come on, that's absolutely laughable.
There are several topics where Android is significantly ahead to the point that iOS is just a toy, and there are areas where the reverse is true.
And I say that as a recent convert, so it's not like I have a decade out of date view of any of the OSs. In my experience I had more visual bugs in case of iOS than android (volume slider not displaying correctly in certain cases when the content was rotated as a very annoying example).
>Come on, that's absolutely laughable.
It's not, though. Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices.
It's going to remain at the same level of polish (i.e. mediocre), except now without the major selling point of being able to run your own apps and have alternative app stores, etc. Back around Ice Cream Sandwich or thereabouts they got rid of "phone calls only mode" and forced us to rely on their half-baked "priority mode" that's an opaque shitshow.
When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
> Google phones are not going to suddenly become luxury devices
Pixel Fold disagrees.
> When my wife is on call she gets random whatsapp notifications dinging all night, whereas when I had an iphone I could set Focus mode and achieve proper "phone calls only".
You can do that with do not disturb.
> Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
That is your opinion. My opinion is different.
> Android is not good. I use it despite its flaws, because of the trade-offs, not because it's better.
Android is good, but Googled Android is not. You should check out GrapheneOS to see what Android done properly looks like.
People buy high-end Android phones like crazy, I don't know what bubble you live in. Samsung Folds and Flips are the luxury phones, not the iPhone Pro Max S eXtreme Edition 32 GB that looks exactly like the base model but has a slightly better camera. People show off their S Pen and perfectly stabilised 100x zoom lens, not their liquid ass. Multi-window and DeX are features for professionals who need to Get Shit Done^TM, iPhones are the toys kids use to send memojis to each other.
And yes, I can also click one button and go into phone calls only mode. I can even set it on a schedule or based on my calendar. I don't know where you're getting your half-baked Android, mine Just Works.
You might not agree with every one of those points, but you can't seriously think everyone thinks like you. Go outside your bubble some time.
Putting "Samsung" and "luxury" in the same sentence is lunacy. Their proprietary Android is even worse than Google's.
Where do you live? I've literally never seen anyone using a Fold or Flip device, ever. My kids are at the age where some of their peers are starting to get phones. All those kids have iPhones.
I'm talking about the OS though.
Me too. The OS sucks.
> Are Google so high on their own supply that they think people use their phones out of preference for the OS? Because frankly it's not very good
Honestly having gone back and forth between iOS and Android every three years or so, both OS are the same. It's not like the grass is really greener on the Apple side. The UX is virtually identical for anything that matters. Personally I put material Android above liquid glass iOS. The alleged polish of the Apple UX was lost on me when I had my last iphone.
The reason Google's moves are surprising has more to do with them embracing being a service player more and more with the arrival of Gemini and them having regulators breathing down their necks everywhere.
I guess they did it after the truly baffling US decision in the Epic trial but it's very likely to go against them in the EU.
The rumors that I have heard (and one government document I read that was poorly translated from Thai) is that there are some countries who are pressuring Google on this to combat info-stealing malware. Apparently, account-takeover/theft is very prevalent in SE Asia where most banking is done via Android phones.
Maybe but lobbying is extremely strong in SE Asia. It's hard to distinguish from governments putting pressure for something and companies suggesting it would be a good idea.
A hard fork is not needed. Non-Google Android do not have to enforce this requirement. It's more important to get as many people on alternatives like GrapheneOS as possible. And fund them by donating to them. If every ~0.5 million GrapheneOS users donated 10 Euro per month, they would be very well-funded.
The answer has to come from anti trust legislation. Android is too big for Google to control.