Do not accept the premise of assholes.

I hope we can get the EU to fund a truly open Android Fork. Maybe under some organisation similar to NL Labs.

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Furthermore, the need for a trustworthy binary to be auditable to a certain hash or something would make banning this a simple task if Google would want to go that route.

I believe devices I own should let me do whatever I want with them and I agree that the verification is BS, but I'll work around it in the ways I can which means building more for the web.

If that ever drops the open pretense (since both traffic and trust authority are largely centralized and thus easily controllable) then I'll only write for self hosted linux boxes.

We as individuals can only do so much. We'd need actual organization and some measure of political power to do anything more since normal people do not care about this.

[1] https://github.com/LiveContainer/LiveContainer

To me, the attention to these verification changes seems misplaced. We need to defend the ability to unlock the bootloader, pressure Google to revive AOSP and then encourage people to switch to a more user-friendly OS.

You're already unable to install what you want on a stock OS due to Android permission model treating you as a third-class citizen, after Google and OEMs.

Google's not going to let you keep your signing key if you do this with it.

And as others mention, using adb (or Shizuku) might also be a workaround for tech-savvy users (for the time being). We list some other potential temporary workarounds at https://keepandroidopen.org. But none of it is viable for the other 99%.

There's really no solution to the dilemma other than stopping Google from implementing it altogether. And for that, we need regulatory action — which means we need to advocate and educate consumers and lawmakers about the threat that this poses.

And a day after you release, Google will say "Oh no you don't" and unverify your app, preventing it from being installed or run. Which is you know, kind of the point of this maneuver.

Google will simply revoke the keys for the "loader" APK. But that's fine for malware, its authors will just use the next stolen credit card to register a new account.

That's also why this has nothing to do with security.

I'd imagine Google would plug any major holes in their soon to be closed garden, assuming that is their intention. So this and any other fix to the problem of 'install app through not-Google Play' that goes via technical means that Google can just cover up after a month or two doesn't actually move the needle any meaningful amount.

In the same vein, using adb isn't a real solution to that same problem for most people, since having to use adb is a massive jump in required effort that's going to leave all the normies behind, with only the super-dedicated willing to go through the hassle, and an equivalent amount of developer effort is going to be left behind as well, since their audience just got decimated, and they themselves might not even bother to develop something that even their dad or sister is going to bother/be able to install. Anything that's much more complicated than 'go to website, download thing, run thing, click your way through' doesn't solve for this.

The actual problem is to have Google not be knobheads about it, and the only way that's realistically going to happen is through the law, but that's not looking all that likely in my view.

Android may ultimately win the arms race, but if they want to be evil, we should make their task as tedious as possible.

Wasn't this kind of solution considered and sort of dismissed (because of too much centralization iirc) by F-Droid (can't find the reference now)? It seems like something that's worth trying, but in the end it's just a band-aid. If it gets any traction Google will shut it down. The real disease is dependence on a duopoly of (quasi)-proprietary OS for the dominant computing platform of our time.

You don't have to distribute via the app store, you dont have to get Googles permission to publish the app or have them sign it.

This looks like purely app validation, we only run apps we can prove originate from the author.

Wouldn't this break all kinds of things, like app sandboxing, the permission system, app intents, …?

Right back to Symbian signed AppTRK and rolling back hardware clocks. Great.

It's going to be the same as Play Protect using the PackageVerifier API. Even if won't trust that Play Protect will continue to allow adb installs, if you go to the developer options you can disable package verifiers for adb installs.

>the concept

This would not really work considering you can't do a lot of things at runtime. You can't create activities, you can't create services, you can't declare permissions, you can't use permissions, etc. Pretty much everything in your manifest can't be done properly. You can't really do a job faking it. You would have to declare a ton of dummy activities with all different permutations of things like launch mode, document launch mode, intent filters, etc.

What you can do are things like game engines like how the android godot editor works where you aren't loading full android apps, but projects into the editor.