I envision this as an ideology. We don't need every kid to follow it, and I don't expect the majority to follow. A 1-2% is good enough. That's why giving speeches to teenages might be the best bang for the buck. There are always kids who need to escape into some cool ideas and it could be the idea of FOSS.

The US anti trust legislation punishes the abuse of monopoly power, not being monopoly in itself. Google was found guilty in leveraging their dominating position on the platform to do just that.

On the other hand in the US Apple's App Store was not found to be a monopoly in the first place. Different cases about abusing dominating position also didn't go far.

Hmm, having read that, I am starting to sympathize with Google if they are going to be punished for being open.

No one seems to care that Apple has never allowed freedom on their devices. Even the comments here don't seem to mention it. Google was at least open for a while.

Or maybe no one mentions it just because the closed iPhone is a fait accompli at this point.

I guess they are going to say whatever to prove the case. The legislation system is highly...closed and shun of laymen.

But the ruling is correct. You can't have it both ways, if you invite competition you're not allowed to be anti-competitive. You can be Nintendo, offer a single store, only allow first party hardware, and exercise total control over your product. Then your anticompetitive behavior can only be evaluated externally. But if you open yourself up to internal competition with other phone vendors, other stores, and then you flex your other business units (gapps) to force those other vendors to favor you then you're in big trouble.

If peopele cared about privacy as much as politics pretends they do, we'd have solved so many problems in society.

Fortunately, those fighting, albeit a minority, have done great work in protecting this. No reason to stop now.

Yeah we are fucked, but as long as a small percentage of us, like 1% of the population knows, understands and agrees with the idea I think we are fine.

One thing worth noting, these checks and restrictions only apply if you're using the original F-Droid repository.

Many times I've seen the IzzyOnDroid repository recommended, but that repo explicitly gives you the APKs from the original developers, so you don't get these benefits.

You know what? That's bullshit.

Anybody slightly competent can put horrendous back doors into any code, in such a way that they will pass F-Droid's "checks", Apple's "checks", and Google's "checks". Source code is barely a speed bump. Behavioral tests are a joke.

Android also has the feature of warning the user if an update is coming from a different source than what is installed. This will happen even if they have the same key. This reply isn't trying to argue against anything you've said. I am just adding to the list of how Android handles updates.

> F-Droid compiles all APKs on its store, and signs them with its own keys. Apps on F-Droid are not signed by the developers of those apps. They're signed by F-Droid, and thus can only be updated through and by F-Droid. F-Droid does not just distribute APKs uploaded by random people, it distributes APKs that F-Droid compiled themselves.

For most programs I use, they just publishing the developer's built (and signed) APK. They do their own build in parallel and ensure that the result is the same as the developer's build (thanks to reproducible builds), but they still end up distributing the developer's APK.

You have to trust somebody.

Who is F-Droid? Why should I trust them?

How do I know they aren’t infiltrated by TLAs? (Three Letter Agencies), or outright bad-actors.

Didn’t F-Droid have 20 or so apps that contained known vulnerabilities back in 2022?

Who are all these people? Why should I trust them, and why do most of them have no link to a bio or repository, or otherwise no way to verify they are who they say they are and are doing what they claim to be doing in my best interests?

https://f-droid.org/en/about/

>> In most cases, F-Droid couldn't know either. A developer transferring their accounts and private keys to someone else is not easily detected.

> 1. The Android OS does not allow installing app updates if the new APK uses a different signing key than the existing one. It will outright refuse, and this works locally on device

You missed the and private keys part of the original claim.

An update can become malicious even without change in permissions.

E.g. my now perfectly fine QR reader already has access to camera (obvious), media (to read QR in an image file or photo) and network (enhanced security by on-demand checking the URL for me and showing OG etc so I can more informed choose to open the URL)

But it could now start sending all my photo's to train an LLM or secretly make pictures of the inside of my home, or start mining crypto or whatnot. Without me noticing.

>...or to suddenly require network access...

That's the most baffling thing to me. There is simply no option to remove network permissions from any app on my Pixel phone.

It's one of the reasons why I avoid using mobile apps whenever I can.

This is a huge problem in the Chrome Web Store and Google is doing very little about it. If you ever made an extension that is even just a little popular, expect to get acquisition offers by people who want to add malicious features somewhere between click fraud, residential IP services or even password stealers.

Indeed, an update can't be more malicious than the permissions allow it to be. You have a calculator app with limited permissions, it is "safe" to set to allow the developer to update it. No danger in that.

But I don't think it is enough, or it is the right model. In other cases, when the app has dangerous permissions already, auto-update should be a no-go.

> You mean install the app?

Correct, I mean install the app.

Sideloading is the corporate jargon for "installing an app".

> Probably because they require APIs which cannot be used when publishing to the AppStore

That's the funny part.

They do stuff they want to prohibit to other developers because "safety".

But we all know that Google can do massively more harm than scammers pushing their scammy apps to a few hundreds people.

For example, in today's news "Google hit with EU antitrust investigation into its spam policy".

There's a bit of irony in it and a lot of hypocrisy, IMO.

Enforcer, informing citizen on basic practices undermines citizen's delusion of being free. Please refer to room 22a for re-alignment and training.

> Your personal data will be kept safe on our servers, citizen, whether you like it or not.

... and our business partners. And app developers that grab your clipboard. And their business partners. and a few more levels of data brokers. The spi^H^H^H data-vacuum must flow

That's all indeed valid.

> One of the best features of Android is that even built-in default applications like the keyboard, browser, launcher, etc can be replaced by alternative implementations.

When sideloading is barred all that can easily change. If you are forced to install everything from the Google Play Store, Google can easily bar such things, again in the name of "security" - alternate keyboards can steal your password, alternate browsers can have adware / malware, alternate launcher can do many naughty things etc. etc.

And note that if indeed giving apps access to SMS / RCS data is really such a desirable feature, Google could have introduced gate-keeping on that to make it more secure, rather than gate-keeping sideloading. For example, their current proposal says that they will allow sideloading with special Google Accounts. Instead of that, why not make it so that an app can access SMS / RCS only when that option is allowed when you have a special Google Account?

The point is that they want to avoid adding any barriers where a user's private data can't be easily accessed.

I'm not sure it's entirely fair to say this is just Google flexing control

I really think all permissions systems need what we had back in xposed/appops days:

Permissions should ~always be "accept (with optional filters)", "deny", and "lie". If the game wants contacts access and won't take no for an answer, I should be able to feed it a lie: empty and/or fake and/or sandboxed data. It's my phone and my data, not the app's.

We had it over a decade ago, xposed supported filtered and fake data for many permissions. It's strictly user-hostile that Android itself doesn't have this capability.

Installing apps from sources that are not the Play Store requires a bit of technical knowledge anyway. My grandma is not going to download a random APK and give all the necessary permissions to install it and run it.

I would like a world where buying something means you get final say over how it operates even if you might do something dangerous/harmful/illegal.

Its my device. Not google's. Imagine telling you which NPM/PIP packages you can install from your terminal.

Also, its not SIDE loading. Its installing an app.

The countries that go after Google are the first wave, they're applying these restrictions globally not much later.

The linked post is full of fluff and low on detail. Google doesn't seem to have the details themselves; they're continuing with the rollout while still designing the flow that will let experienced users install apps like normal.

A small number of countries now. The rest of the world in 2027 and beyond.

Youtube already employs DRM on some of their videos (notably their free* commercial movies). if you try to take a screenshot, the frame is blacked out. this can be bypassed by applying a CSS blur effect of 0 pixels, permitting extraction; detection of DRM protection and applying the bypass is likely trivial for the kinds of people already writing scripts and programs utilizing yt-dlp. the css method of bypass has been widely disseminated for years (over a decade?), but programmers love puzzles, so a sequel to current DRM implementation seems justified. YT could also substantially annoy me by expiring their login cookies more frequently; I think I have to pull them from my workstation every month or two as-is? at some point, they could introduce enough fragility to my scripts where it's such a bother to maintain that I won't bother downloading/watching the 1-3 videos per day I am today -- but otoh, I've been working on a wasm/Rust mp4 demuxer and from-scratch WebGL2 renderer for video and I'm kind of attached to seeing it through (I've had project shelved for ~3 weeks after getting stuck on a video seek issue), so I might be willing to put a lot of effort into getting the videos as a point of personal pride.

the real pain in the butt in my present is Patreon because I can't be arsed to write something separate for it. as-is, I subscribe to people on Patreon and then never bother watching any of the exclusive content because it's too much work. some solutions like Ghost (providing an API for donor content access) get part of the way to a solution, but they are not themselves a video host, and I've never seen anyone use it.

Something I've never understood about DRM is, if the content is ultimately played on my device, what stops me from reverse engineering their code to make an alternative client or downloader? Is it just making it harder to do so? Or is there a theoretical limit to reverse engineering that I'm not getting? Do they have hardware decryption keys in every monitor, inside the LCD controller chip?

All levels of Widevine are cracked, but only the software-exclusive vulnerabilities are publicly available. It's only used for valuable content though (netflix/disney+/primevideo), so it might still work out for YouTube as no one will want to waste a vulnerability on a Mr. Beast slop video.

I still don't get this mindset - all is lost, I am not going to do anything aboit that AND I will punish them by going with the even worse option!

What changed is that Apple made the masses familiar with the concept of installing software only from a store with a vetting process. For short, the walled garden. That was mostly an alien thing in the world of software. All of us grew with the possibility of getting an installer and install it whenever we wanted. There were some form of protections against piracy but nothing else.

Once Apple created the walled garden every other company realized how good it could be for their bottom lines and attempted to do the same thing.

So, to answer your question, Microsoft got blamed for viruses and made fun of but there wasn't a better way in the mainstream. There is one now.

PCs will resist this trend for a while because it's also mainstream that they are used to do work. Many people use a PC every day with some native application from a company they have a direct contract with. For example: accounting software. Everybody can add another example from their own experience. Those programs don't come from the Windows store and it will be a long term effort to gatekeep everything into the store or move them into a web browser.

The .NET MAUI technology we had a post about yesterday is one of the bricks that can build the transition.

Windows 95 (and patronage) had become a shitshow. It’s easy to forget how much time us tech types were spending “fixing” uncle’s PC that somehow got malware on it. How we touted Linux as an escape from the hellscape of crapware.

It was into this void that the “everything seems new” iPhone stepped and ventured out in a different course. I’m neither speaking for or against apples normalization of an App Store as a primary source of updates, just recalling the way things were, and positing that Apple was trying a different approach that initially offered a computing platform that wasn’t the hellscape that MS platform was quickly becoming.

I always blamed Microsoft for Windows insecurity. But seriously, Windows did not have any vetting process for apps and apps didn't really have access to money. Google's problem is that they claim Android is a secure way to do banking but it isn't.

Let's take the "W". This is pretty good news!

So you will now need a useless and needless account to build and run your own apps? It's like Microsoft forcing online login on pcs.

Which is totally fine IMO, it was weird to me that they weren't going with this approach when they first announced it.

Macs blocked launching apps from unverified devs, but you can override in settings. I thought they could just do something along those lines.

We've always called it "install".

Red herring. Self-signed certificates have always been accepted, and generating a certificate is a one-liner:

    keytool -genkeypair -keystore mykey.jks -alias myalias -keyalg RSA

He said one-time.

> An app can read the content of notifications if the appropriate permissions are granted, which includes 2FA codes sent by SMS or email.

Do apps generally do this? I've never run into one that doesn't expect me to type in the number sent via SMS or email, rather than grabbing it themselves.

I don't use a lot of apps on my android phone, though, so maybe this is a dumb question to those who do.

Yes, but see my last paragraph. Reading notifications doesn’t apply to the majority of apps. It’s not a binary choice. On iOS, you need special entitlements for certain high level privileges. Isn’t it already the same on Android?

You may be overthinking it. Verification of some sort isn’t the end of the world, it’s arguably an acceptable damage control stop-gap that has precedent on other platforms like special entitlements on iOS and kernel extensions on Windows.

Googles proposal was to require everyone to verify to publish any app through any channel. That would be the equivalent of a web browser enforcing a whitelist of websites, because one scam site asked for access to something bad.

If scam apps use an API designed by Google to steal user data, then they should fix that, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I mean the solution really is a comprehensive permissions system, for an accessibility system that needs to read notifications you should be able to deny it network permissions and whitelist which app's notifications it's allowed to read

browsers are really not much better. on an absolute level, I definitely agree they're better (e.g. they have per-url and only-after-click permissions for some things), but they've all got huge gaps still once you start touching extensions. and beyond that it remains to be seen, since OS-level permissions are significantly broader-possibility than in-browser due to being able to touch far more sensitive data.

Complying with the law is just another way of protecting your money. I have no doubt if they would break laws if they judged it better for the bottom line --- in fact I have little doubt they're already doing so. On the flip side, if there were ruinous penalties for their anticompetitive behaviors (i.e., in the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars) they might change course.

Certainly voters need to have their say, but often their message is muffled by the layers of political and administrative material it passes through.

> Just yesterday there was a story on here about how Google found [a security vulnerability that anyone running `ffmpeg -i <untrusted file> ...` was vulnerable to] in FFMPEG, and told [the world about it so that everyone could take appropriate action before hackers found the same thing and exploited it, having first told the ffmpeg developers about it in case they wanted to fix it before it was announced publicly]

Fixed that for you. Google's public service was both entirely appropriate and highly appreciated.

If you don't look both ways when you cross the road, then you may get hit by a car. The solution is to pay attention.

It's acceptable to build a system where human error can lead to catastrophic consequences, even death. Every time you go outside you encounter many of these systems.

Not everything in life can be made 100% safe, but that's no reason to stop living.

There are definitely things you could do to improve it though. E.g. you can't activate "I know what I'm doing" mode while on the phone or for 1 hour after a phone call. Someone else suggested a one-day cooldown.

Also for the specific scam they mentioned, why do apps even have permission to intercept all notifications?? Just fix that!

> Then i guess you can't publish apps?

I want to distribute apps (someone might also want to simply sell them), not publish them

I don't need a publisher, internet is a publishing media already

> you don't have the right to publish to the android platform

then let me install an alternative OS on the HW i legally bought and own or pay me back.

> the harms caused by malware and malicious actors

life is full of people doing harms and malicious actors, but we don't let Google or any other company gatekeep our lives

How about the harms of fascist authoritarian governments that will use this functionality to ban any apps they don't like? Why do you people only care about malware and not essential fundamental freedoms that affect us every fucking day?

> people like you are being obtuse, unwilling to find a solution or a compromise.

How are people being obtuse for refusing to compromise for solutions on a problem which doesn’t exist?

You can’t misrepresent the situation, establish that one American company having absolute control on what people do with their devices is somehow the norm and then complain that people won’t meet you halfway.