Android Developer Verification
android-developers.googleblog.com
android-developers.googleblog.com
1) Provided my company DUNS number etc. once to create the payment profile. I did this some times ago, don’t remember the details but it was an involved verification process and it is marked as verified business payment profile.
2) Later on the payment step verified myself with a passport and bank statement to be able to actually pay with a proper HSBC bank card. Not shady pre-paid card or something, those are not accepted anyway.
3) After I paid I was told that now I need to verify my identity once more but this time with the passport and the incorporation certificate or some other company document.
fingers crossed that in few days it will be verified. While waiting, it tells me that there are still website and email verification to do once the previous step is done. I already verified my e-mail a few times before paying.
It’s painful, slow and annoying because if you fail at a step(i.e. needs verification that takes days and you are told about it at the payment step) you have to start again with the forms.
I just remembered why I never use Android. It seems like no one owns the process and as a result you get unpolished shitty experience that fulfills the requirements of god knows how many people who work in the same company but don’t talk to each other.
My experience with getting a verified "business" developer account from Google mirrors the experience as getting one from Apple, except it's a one-time fee and much less than Apple.
Yes there are hoops to jump through, identification usually requires some hoops, but pretty it's straightforward. I am not commenting on the requirements of these hoops, yes, it's BS that they exist but it's their platform so it's their rules.
What type of "experience" are you expecting to have anyway?
How does that mirror uploading my passport many times, entering company details many times, typing my e-mail and phone numbers many times both because I had to start over and because I was asked many times even if I provided these some steps back? Now I paid and waiting, hopefully I will later be verifying my e-mail address or something that I verified a few times prior.
> What type of "experience" are you expecting to have anyway?
The Apple experience. An experience that is well thought and streamlined, that doesn’t keep me entering the same information over and over again. I don’t mind paying a little more for well designed products. The $75 difference is nothing to justify this charade, I don’t think that that Google was short of $75 and designed this low quality experience, I think it’s engraver in their DNA.
Being told upfront what is required to complete the process so you don't have to start over again multiple times?
What would you consider broken?
The correct approach here (AFAIK) is to punt the trust decision to the bank by requiring payment with a method that you can confidently trace to the company.
However that invites those bad scenarios where someone gets blacklisted by BigTech in some manner, later gets hired by a small business, the new employer adds an association to the blacklisted account, and suddenly the company app is banned from the app store seemingly without reason. At least a few such stories have appeared on HN over the years.
I feel like pay to play ought to be sufficient because in addition to being a barrier to entry it also provides funds for moderation efforts.
Which is not that unreasonable even. If a person is flagged for making scam apps, them having publishing rights in a reputable place makes taints the reputation of such place.
You should be able to appeal of course and the oauth should not be towards google in the first place, but being associated with known fraudsters and scammers is not what you want.
It's even more nefarious when it comes to BigTech because you can be blacklisted without having committed any actual crime and without anything resembling a trial.
Individual accounts and employee accounts are conceptually distinct. Permitting anything less gives large companies free reign to run roughshod over the individual by unilaterally depriving him of his livelihood.
This is no longer the case, see the example of Hüseyin Dogru, a journalist who faces political EU sanctions (no trial) and now cannot transact with EU citizens or travel. Authorities have now siezed the bank account of his wife and are treating her as if she is sanctioned, even though she is not, so their family is now broke and cannot even pay for food. Because they are not allowed to travel they cannot return to Switzerland.
This kind of blacklisting also comes up in non-sanctioned contexts with de-banking and political de-platforming based on government pressure. The world is headed to a very dark place.
Crime is not the only thing that exists in a law. One can work in a regulated profession and lose a license for not adhering to the rules. Such person can in theory go and do something that doesn't affect the society negatively and this isn't exactly a punishment for a crime. Now if someone employs such person again after they lost their license, that new employer maybe be sanctioned as well. All of that usually comes with some kind of appeal mechanism.
BTW both the id card and the passport have cryptographic authentication and you are able to open a bank account or use govt services completely online by scanning it with the phone Rfid . They could have make me scan that, scan my face and be done with the identity verification. My identity is already verified and tied to my company the same way and also listed in the companies registry which means they could have had skipped all the other company verification stuff too.
The entire cumbersome process you describe can be viewed as Google doing a significantly worse job of verifying your identity than the bank would have.
As an aside, I suspect that leaving it to the bank would also provide additional legal protection. Specifically anyone attempting deception will most likely be forced to commit fraud against the bank which will probably be taken much more seriously than otherwise.
The authorization is not transitive so to say.
>As an aside, I suspect that leaving it to the bank would also provide additional legal protection
If it would, they will have to pay the bank for it and the bank should also be willing to accept the liability (spoiler alert -- the will not be willing to accept the liability)
We aren't talking about authorization, only about identity verification. I'm no domain expert but it is my understanding that banks provide these sorts of services. They certainly already have all the necessary information on hand both for practical reasons (security) as well as legal (KYC and AML laws).
> If it would, they will have to pay the bank for it ...
For the identity verification? Probably, depending on how you went about it. What's the issue? This is already a paid process we're talking about here.
For the additional legal assurance that I described? No, that doesn't cost extra. Please read what I wrote more carefully. It's a transitive property due to the penalties involved in addition to the degree to which the legal system and the bank care (at least assuming my understanding of that legal environment is correct).
"how do we asses a complex situation where identity of the person X is one of the signals (but maybe not the strongest one) with enough certainty to balance a probability Y of bad something happening that will cost us Z and still make money"
Most of the time Y and Z are defined because the other department said so and we trust our colleagues, dus the answer is computable (somebody somewhere has it open in a spreadsheet right now).
If you add a transitive property to the system, then, unless there is some regulatory magic that caps the possible value space of Y and Z, the answer is (by default) no.
That is you, for tax and legal purposes in the jurisdictions within which you reside, an individual, operating a business by yourself as yourself.
Recent things I've had to do:
1) Re-submit an app after it was rejected and labelled a gambling app (it wasn't even close - a 15 second look by a real human would have seen that. This one was even appealed and the support was utterly useless. I ended up changing one word and re-submitting the app, approved no problem.
2) An existing app, in the Play store for years but a nice app - only about 500 installs. I had to submit a new version for no reason whatsoever... Except to keep the customers developer account active.
Those are just issues I've dealt with in the last month or two.
Every single time, Google Support is completely useless - including the appeals process, which is an absolute joke.
So bad actors would just target lower SDK versions and ignore the privacy improvements
Of course, they don't like this because then apps can't easily refuse to work if not allowed to spy.
Consider - it's a voip dialing client which has a requirement to provide location for E911 support.
If the OS vendor starts providing invalid data, it's the OS vendor which ends up being liable for the person's death.
e.g. https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/texas-sues-vonage-over-91...
which is from 2005, but gives you an idea of the liability involved.
And you can manually force only the voip dialing apps instead of everyone
I guess Vonage should try to appeal the case and say pocksuppet said they're not required to do that.
Is there a way around this shitocracy?
Refuse to play. Switch to technologoy that the shitocracy has not gotten around to yet, or, eventually, pick up woodworking.
1: I mean, it is, certainly. I'm just not sure if I can make money by making leather gear.
- after fixing the app description I got rejected for using my app name(?!), multiple back and forths with the reviewer got me nowhere, they just copy pasted the same response not addressing my messages at all
- filled the app store review board appeal, it's been 5 days and I've got no response.
At this point I'm seriously considering rewriting the app for MacOS and distributing myself. I can't imagine going through all of this with every app update, it's beyond ridiculous.
"I didn't impersonate a third party," I explained in my message to Lieutenant Appleby. "I only wrote a disclaimer stating: Not affiliated with ACME."
"Exactly," lieutenant appleby replied. "By stating you have nothing to do with ACME, you have involved ACME. Therefore, you are unlawfully impersonating an unaffiliated party."
"But I only mentioned them to prove I wasn't affiliated with them!"
"Which is a violation," Lieutenant Appleby pointed out.
It was a Catch-22. The Guidelines stated that to prove you were not affiliated with a third party, you had to write a disclaimer. But to write the disclaimer, you had to type the third party’s name, which was a strict violation of the rule against mentioning third parties you were not affiliated with.
I deleted the disclaimer, thereby making myself safely affiliated with nobody by refusing to acknowledge anyone. I resubmitted the app.
Lieutenant Appleby rejected it again.
"What is it this time?" I asked.
"You are using your app's name," Lieutenant Appleby replied.
"Of course I am using my app's name," I replied back. "It is the name of my app."
"You cannot use that name. It is trademark infringement."
"Infringing on whose trademark?"
"The app's."
"But I am the app! It is my app!"
"Which is exactly why you cannot use it," Lieutenant Appleby wrote patiently. "If you use the app's name, you are impersonating the app. And impersonation is strictly forbidden by the Guidelines. An app cannot go around pretending to be itself!"
However, thanks to many of us that only favour Chrome like IE of yore, and ship it alongside their "native" applications, the Web is nowadays ChromeOS Application Platform, so we are only a couple of years away of Google owning that as well.
Companies operating in Europe must provide a clear way to appeal automated decisions: https://www.edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/publicat...
You might not have a way to actually file a complaint against them but quite often, their legal department will just have a quick look at your case and just give you what you want without bothering to tell you anything. Worth a shot.
If you are in EU you could try complaining to your local DPA. That certainly sounds like "automated decision which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her" which is against article 22 of GDPR. Or you could consider suing them directly at least for the refund.
Outside of EU maybe try passing law like GDPR to actually get some rights back.
Google seems to actively hate people who develop for their platforms. Which I don't believe is a good move with their current hand, where young people in wealthy countries (i.e. the future of people who will spend money on apps) are something like 90% iPhone users these days.
Google has seemingly never seen an elderly person's phone, where it is completely infected with crap including literal popup ads (that somehow overlay other apps), yet all of it was downloaded from GPlay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware
https://www.ibm.com/think/topics/malware
https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ddos/glossary/malware/
https://www.cisco.com/site/us/en/products/security/what-is-m...
https://www.britannica.com/technology/malware
https://www.fortinet.com/resources/cyberglossary/malware
https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/threats/what-is-ma...
https://www.mcafee.com/learn/malware/
https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/what-is/malware.html
https://www.t-mobile.com/home-internet/the-signal/internet-h...
I remember
Of course the FLOSS aspect adds an additional hurdle that this popular piece of software will have to somehow avoid having much of a contributor community around it since that would greatly increase the risks of your malicious changeset being reviewed. I guess what happened with XZ was about the best case scenario that an attacker could realistically hope for.
Google doesn't care about F-Droid one way or the other. It's a niche project that barely registers on the scale of all Android users.
Just like they allow installing apps from the Play Store without the 24h verification, they should allow installing apps from F-Droid or the Epic Games Store without verification.
Either you want to target the Play store so that you can get a wider install base but need to deal with tighter controls or you want to distribute flagrantly malicious stuff to people for banking trojans or whatever via social engineering to get them to sideload. F-Droid doesn't help with either of these things.
So choosing FLOSS protects you from malware.
My analysis consisted of pulling a completely baseless number out of my arse that fit my agenda.
I'm so tired of companies claiming stuff with "we did research, just trust me bro" and providing no source to be scrutinized.
I've been using Android since 2010 because it was open in ways that the Apple ecosystem wasn't. I do not want this and imagine hardly any other power users (for lack of a better term) do. I'm already using a mostly deGoogled device but this really seals the deal. I have been longing for a true Linux phone for years and now seems like a good time to get serious about the search and migration plan.
Android isn't open source for a while. They started by pushing device certification which crippled any abilities of OEMs to make a better framework. Then they took many of the opensource packages out of android and redistributed as applications that they controlled via play services.
Then they made it harder to publish packages and created tons of rules that they can arbitrarily decide to cut ties with you or remove your remuneration.
What they are effectively doing now is to remove any ability of individual developers to push applications. Some will say the costs ain't that high, but (1) maybe not in USD dollars for Americans and (2) both Google and Apple will push those numbers way up high soon.
Even if that is not the case, if you don't agree with anything and you decide to have your own version of your family wiki, messenger or anything, they will be able to tell the authorities about it.
This is insane....
But I think there is a good chance they will finally open those now - never really made any sense to keep them closed and preventing the community from contributing. Rumors had it it was due to non-cooperative investors.
Not Jolla is finally independent again, so at least in theory they can finally do the right thing. :)
I.N.S.T.A.L.L.I.N.G S.O.F.T.W.A.R.E
So I don't understand your analogy? Are you suggesting that pedestrians own the streets and should do what they please, as users own their phone and should have the right to do as they please? Or something else?
Grandparent is saying that the term sideloading was invented in a similar fashion to delegitimize a previously completely normal way to use an electronic device.
In the cities? Yes, absolutely.
The UK Highway Code has a RFC-like use of MUST/SHOULD; MUST parts are legally binding, the parts relating to pedestrians are SHOULD.
Jaywalking is only illegal if there's a crossing less than 50m away. (And even then it's only a misdemeanor, not a crime).
That also means that city planners have to balance between people jaywalking, putting crossings everywhere, and how crossings slow down traffic.
And every time a car makes a turn, pedestrians automatically have priority. Which creates an implicit zebra crossing.
The only roads exempt from this are autobahn/motorways. These are by law prohibited from having direct access to anything.
That's IMO also a way for the US to get out of its current situation. Set up a rule like that, with a large distance at the beginning, and slowly reduce it over the next few years, forcing local planners to introduce additional crossings, which also reduces through traffic. The separation of streets vs autobahn also mostly prevents stroads.
The only situations where it's enforced (from what I've seen so obviously biased) is major highways, city streets with dense traffic and a marked crossing within half a block, and when they want to search someone for contraband. In the latter case it's just an excuse to stop and harass you in the hopes they will manage to generate sufficient articulable suspicion to justify a search.
Only for turning traffic, though, i.e. as a pedestrian you still need to yield to traffic coming from the side street. There was some talk of having pedestrians participate more fully in right-of-way-rules, too, i.e. if the side street has a yield/stop sign, traffic would have to yield to crossing pedestrians, too, but so far that idea didn't get anywhere.
Let's apply the "side load" apps logic to Desktop applications, imagine you have to pass for an entire process just to install an app you downloaded?
n.b. "you" were not considered in my statement save as an agent.
This doesn't make sense to me. iOS and Android (and HarmonyOS) all allow you to "install software".
Every non-stock app on my phone was installed from an APK directly downloaded from the manufacturer or open source developer's site / Github releases. I've never had a Google Play account and have never used any Android "app store".
The biggest pain was having to manually logon the couple of sites I allow to keep persistent cookies since device owners aren't allowed to just import/export cookies from mobile Chrome.
It has been a very nice experience. I appreciate the feeling of sovereignty and ownership of my device (even though it does have a locked bootloader and I don't actually have root).
Of course Google would take this away. >sigh<
After all that was done, the phone felt like mine in a way that my iPhone doesn't. Was a good feeling. With luck, the Motorola + Graphene partnership will produce phones with screens better than the Pixel and I can keep doing this.
I'm hopeful, too, re: Motorola + Graphene. I wanted to use Graphene last fall wehn I got the new phone but I was committed to not giving Google any money.
I know because I’m one of them and something like 70% of my SWE colleagues I’ve known — including Android users — fit that description too. Most have never sideloaded anything and maybe 20% have flashed their phone with an alternative ROM or rooted at some point.
An individual being good with computers or even being capable of programming has little bearing on if they’re also a phone power user.
I have never told anyone what I, ahem, install.
Maybe the sideloader is a power user in comparison to the celebrities, but who is a real power user is those who can to sideload without the sideloading. Power users of your smartphone are: top-management of the vendor, the Government and 0-day scene. Sideloading actor IMO is just a poser to the idea of a power user.
Snoop-phone useds are powerless.
The other groups are those who use it identically to how they would iOS (and don’t root or sideload), those that use it as computer replacement, and those who just like to tinker. Those last two groups are a tiny, tiny sliver relative to the others.
Tge flipside of that is that Google and Apple have no viable alternatives. It would take years to build what they have.
It took Huawei about 5 years with Harmony OS to do it but odds if that making it far out side of China is limited.
Bold of you assuming they're doing for users. It's fear-mongering at its finest - using the threat of security to install more control that has little to no protection against the said threats.
Now you might say it's going to raise the bar for the scammers, but nobody is going to be spending time on writing scam or malware for a few bucks. When the reward is high, they can just pay out already verified developers to distribute their builds under their accounts, or just find a workaround (fake ids?) which could be still way cheaper than the potential revenue potential of a successful attack. It's just an inconvenience that didn't existed before.
This is just a policy directly targeting the legit developers distributing apps to work around some of the platform's limitations (ie. uncrappifying youtube). They were previously free to share the workarounds they've developed for themselves since it was just as easy as sharing your APK. Now with added threat of losing your developer account and probably being perma-banned from google, those devs are less likely to continue distributing their workarounds.
Companies shouldn't wait to solve issues like this - they should be proactively helping their most vulnerable users. That is the "do no evil" motto.
I don't know enough to say whether this method is the right approach however.
Unless you built your house yourself, you should expect the construction company to be responsible for verifying the identities of anyone entering your house. Asking for a passport and a one time payment, just in case the person who rings the bell may not be a friend.
That should be proactively helping you in case you're a vulnerable homeowner. Not checking in on every visitor would be evil, no?
I can't think of a better approach.
But we, owners, collectively choose that. We choose the security company, we pay then, we can vote them out. Most importantly: the construction company has zero say in this.
Also, no one actually check the IDs of my friends, and they don't have to pay the construction company when they first come.
I give the codes, they ring, I open. I hire a company to monitor the building but I can kick then out any day.
I own the place, you see?
That doesn't necessarily preclude helping the user to notice when they're doing something dangerous, but a waiting period before the computer becomes general-purpose seems pretty extreme.
(in Gilbert Huph (Wallace Shawn) voice) Yes, precisely!
I think they should help their median users and empower their power users, and they should absolutely throw a few "most vulnerable" users under the bus if that's necessary. Otherwise you think about banning kitchen knives to protect the "most vulnerable users" who are too stupid to handle a knife. No, we shouldn't do that. Their stupidity should be their problem, not our problem.
Some degree of collateral damage must be accepted to maximize the expected value of a product or service. Minimizing risks can't be the top priority. Don't ban kitchen knives. What you are effectively arguing for is transforming both Windows and macOS into a closed iOS. Don't do that.
They do. They absolutely do. Where have you been in the last 20 years? Windows has had a reputation as an unsafe ecosystem for decades. Even amongst non-tech people. And even with the various exploits the biggest source of viruses on windows was always that, lacking a proper channel to distribute applications, they had trained their users to double click any .exe on the internet and the next>next>next in whatever installer. I don't agree with the tightening of developer account requirements, but this argument doesn't hold at all.
The last time I heard these complaints were before Windows XP Service Pack 2, which added automatic Windows updates and ended the flood of viruses like Sasser or MyDoom.A. That was more than 20 years ago. On top of that, Windows Vista later added an integrated virus scanner and UAC dialogues, which gave you a big warning whenever you wanted to open an executable file. I haven't heard of any widespread viruses since. Nowadays most people don't even need to install software because most things are SAAS/cloud and run via the browser now.
Now the biggest "security issue" seems to stem from not-so-bright users being convinced by phone scammers to transfer them money or something like that. I don't think this is a problem with Windows.
Anyway in this case it's nothing more than a thinly veiled excuse to justify making ecosystem changes that are in their favor. They aren't acting in good faith.
Just to drive the point home. Not that you would do this but you _could_ even implement such a system fully anonymously - with uploads via tor and payments via XMR - and it should still work just as well.
Add in a third even more expensive tier for those providing source code to the auditor where google verifies a signed deterministic build the same way fdroid does. Now clearly mark the three different tiers in the app store.
And if they went this route the next logical step for highly sensitive stuff like banking and password management would be a fourth licensed and bonded tier where a verified individual located in a friendly country took on liability for any fraud or other malpractice. That tier would be the equivalent to the situation for civil engineers.
Instead we're stuck in a reality where I don't trust sourcing password managers (among other things) from the play store. Those only ever come from fdroid for me - you know, an actually secure model for how to do app distribution and verify builds.
And Google benefits financially from the problem.
Different judge you say? You're right. But when Google in their appeal asked the judge why the app store isn't a monopoly, the judge told Google with a straight face
"You can't be anti-competitive if you have no competitors."
Google took note.
2%, according to the keepandroidopen.org poll[^1]
[^1] https://techhub.social/@keepandroidopen/116251892296272830
Developers and enthusiasts are an extreme minority that's incredibly vocal. I think most people here disagree with Google's approach but too many people are pretending like their interests and use cases are significant on a "half the planet" scale.
The idea isn't to protect the power users or average users. It's to protect the most vulnerable. Android is for everyone. Us power users will have a minor speed bump, but we can deal.
If Apple announced that they were going to allow installing apps like how you can install APKs you will have a whole group of people on here arguing against it because they want Apple to have control over everything. You could have seen those people in action on the Epic v. Apple and Digital Markets Act discussions.
Tie in the app to a verified identity/individual and it makes the audit process easier as well as engagement with authorities from the user's country if required (e.g. app facilitating child abuse).
I'm going to go on a limb and say that the amount of apps dedicated to facilitating child abuse is close to 0, and the popular apps from verified developers being used for child abuse is close to 100%.
There are millions of people affected by targeted scams every year, significantly outnumbering the non-developer sideload community. Especially when you take into account that the sideload community doesn't all use Google Android and isn't affected by this.
Separately, they're going to increase friction the first time you allow installing apps outside of the Play Store or via this mechanism and also decrease friction on subsequent times, also on Google Android builds.
This intro immediately tells me that whatever comes after will be horrible for users and developers. Surprise surprise, I was right. Software to "verify" side loaded apps is a bad, anti user idea.
What they call "apps" are "apps that we like and we distribute to you under our control of both yourself as a registered user and the developers".
Well, I guess I'll need to install a non-Android distribution then. I hope one would be available for my phone by the end of the year :-(
It all worked perfectly fine back on my iPod touch, pre-premium bs. Tech is regressing.
I'm on a family plan (cheap) and I use it for the music player for the inevitable question of why I'm doing this.
And that launch country list is most likely the countries where cracked YouTube Premium is most common.
App piracy is huge by copying around modded APK's, and everyone's grandma is doing it.
> Starting in April, Android Developer Verifier will be installed on devices.
so they're rolling out a system app that will call home to check whether any sideloaded apps have been "verified" with the developer's government ID? and this process will happen regardless of whether the user has enabled the "advanced flow" in Developer settings?
I wonder how that sys app will be handled in GrapheneOS's google play sandbox?
GOS have already said users won't be impacted by this clampdown.
Also the person is not the company, why is Google making the developer identify oneself while many apps are released under a company? My understanding is that Google has been mishandling this for a while but with the verification linked to a government id that just seems like another can of worms.
A few scenarios to consider:
- The developer is fired/resigns and the company does not want to be associated with the developer, for example if the developer is convicted for something.
- The developer is fired/resigns and the developer does not want to be associated with the company, developer found out about certain practices of the company they don't condone.
- The developer and the company part in good faith, however one of them is being exploited/pressured by a third party to abuse the relationship to the app.
- The developer or the company is on legal hold due to legal issues, arrests, malpractice etc.
- The developer passes away or the company ceases to exist.
- How does this work if you are making an app as a developer for hire, when entering into a contract with a publisher for example. Who will verify and how will that work (especially on small scale apps).
If I get a phone with preinstalled Graphene OS (like the upcoming Motorola phone), then does it avoid this stupidity? Or even with Graphene it prevents me from installing apks?
Has anyone seen the report for that analysis. I bet most people here would love to read it too.
P(malware) = P(nalware | Google Play) * P(Google Play) + P(malware | non-Google Play) * P(non-Google Play)
It's the combination of both factors that counts. Even if Google Play has a lower malware rate, a user is still far more likely to try to install apps through Google Play given the sheer size of its catalog and its prominent, default placement on people's devices.
F-Droid has not meaningfully improved since that piece was written, either. No one should use F-Droid.
The F-Droid model of having multiple repositories in one app is absolutely perfect because it gives me control (rather than the operating system) over what repositories I decide to add. There is no scenario in which I wish Android to question me on whether I want to install an app from a particular F-Droid repository.
The section you linked in particular is a load of editorialized bullshit IMO. As far as I can tell the only legitimate complaint is that there is (or was?) some sort of issue with the signing methodology for both APKs and repository metadata. Specifically they were apparently very slow to replace deprecated methods that had known issues. However it's worth noting that they appear to have been following what were at one point standard practices.
The certificate pinning nonsense is particularly egregious. APT famously doesn't need TLS unless you're concerned about confidentiality. It's the same for any package manager that securely signs everything, and if there's ever a signing vulnerability then relying on TLS certainly might save you but seems extremely risky. On top of that the Android TOFU model means none of this matters in the slightest for already installed apps which is expected to be the case the vast majority of the time.
As far as I'm concerned F-Droid is the best currently available option. That said of course there are places it could improve.
Debian repositories are quite secure, but also pretty limited in scope and extremely slow to update. In practice, basically everyone (I'm sure there are a few counterexamples) using a Linux distro uses it as a base and runs extra software from less tightly controlled sources: Docker hub, PyPI, npm, crates, Flathub etc. It's far easier for attackers to target those, but their openness also means there's a lot of useful stuff there that's not in Debian.
Holding up Debian as a model for security is one step up from the old joke about securing your computer by turning it off and unplugging it. It's true, but it's not really interesting.
In short, using FLOSS is the way to ensure security. Whenever you touch proprietary staff, be careful and use compartmentalization.
When npm has supply chain attacks it's still news.
On Google Play Store its actually noteworthy when an app isn't some level of malware loaded with ads and questionable permissions.
I submitted my government-issued ID and bank statements multiple times. Each time rejected, no specific explanation why. After several rounds I gave up, assuming my developer account would at least stay dormant until I felt like trying again.
It didn't. Google deleted the account entirely. No warning, no refund of the €25 registration fee or whatever it costed. When I eventually wanted to publish again, I had to create a new account and pay again. The second time around they accepted my driving license - the same type of document category they had rejected before.
So the real cost of a bad verification experience isn't just time. If you give up and walk away, you lose your fee and start from zero. That's the part that stung, at least for me.
Really glad I have done that - I've been a 'boiled frog' of sorts on Android for a while now. Not happy with being continually more and more locked down, but not quite unhappy enough to shift. Feels like a breath of fresh air to have software that's built to serve me, rather than just to serve me ads.
As it stands, Android Developer Verification (ADV) is a death sentence for F-Droid, Obtainium, and other competitors to the Google Play Store, both commercial and non-commercial. We are disappointed that they are still trying to steamroll this through in the face of overwhelming public opposition.
There are numerous reasons to object to the program, but a few of the top ones are:
1. You own your computer, and you should be the sole decision-maker for what software you can install on it.
2. "Malware" means whatever Google says it means, and their terms and conditions change daily; today malware is banking scams, tomorrow it is … ad-blocking? VPNs? Their decisions are un-reviewable and opaque, and they have obvious commercial incentives to block certain kinds of (otherwise-legal) software.
3. Centralizing global developer registrations through a US corporation makes it subject to the rules (and whims) of the current regime. Citizens of sanctioned countries or members of sanctioned entities (like the International Criminal Court) will be legally barred from registering, blocking them from creating and distributing software _anywhere_ in the world (not just the US).
4. Scenarios that Google claims ADV will protect against — such as high-pressure phone calls manipulating vulnerable users into installing scam apps — have _already_ been addressed by incremental improvements to Android security over the years, such as "Enhanced Fraud Protection" introduced in Android 13 (and expanded in Android 15). Android has incrementally improved its security features over its near 20 years of existence. There is no evidence that anything has suddenly changed to justify such a disproportionate and extreme lockdown.
5. Being required to pay Google for the privilege of uploading your government identification so that you might be permitted to contribute to the Android software ecosystem is such an abominable insult to the developers that helped build the platform. It deserves all the utter contempt that has been heaped upon it thus far, and begs regulatory scrutiny from those few countries that still have the courage to stand up to these bullies.
We emphatically recommend against developers signing up for this program or endorsing it in any way.
Perhaps your team should promote GNU/Linux phones instead, which do not depend on a megacorp.
Sent from my Librem 5.
This is a case of companies forcing things on us "for our own good" and them knowing better than us what is good for us or not.
These two statements contradict. When something is public, it is not entirely safe; and to make something safe, there is exclusion of practices, behaviors, and often people.
> So as an extra layer of security, we are rolling out Android developer verification to help prevent malicious actors from hiding behind anonymity to repeatedly spread harm.
1. Well, then, surely Google can't be in charge of this process, because they are a malicious actor, known to manipulate social media search results and engage in mass surveillance of its users. And that's in addition to analyzing their personal data to try to manipulate them into buying things; which is called "targeted advertizing", but I would also characterize as harm.
2. To be slightly less tongue-in-cheek: Imagine that a two would prevent entry of unverified people - you know, to prevent malicious anonymous actors from bringing harm. That would be ridiculous - nobody should be able to restrict public space. Well, the space of computation and communications via our handheld phones/computers is enough of a public space to merit the same principle. Which means that it is not acceptable for it to be under Google/Alphabet's control. Government regulation could mitigate this problem, but then, governments collude with large corporations and often approve of such restrictions.
I guess I can sort of manage to keep my head above water and keep buying secondhand phones which I unlock and install a supported version of LineageOS. But it's cumbersome, it gets more difficult and more restrictive every time. And I literally have a doctorate in computers for crying out loud! Is there any hope for Granny? For a kid? For >99% of people? Of course not.
This is so clearly a matter for government oversight: prevent abuse, monopolies, protect the citizen's safety, rights, welfare, etc. It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly). That's why we have laws and food inspectors, paid for by the public, working for the public. Same thing with digital rights.
IMHO governments are partially behind those initiatives so they are unlikely to regulate themself- reason in last few years they intensified work on Digital ID, Age Verification, Chat control, KYC, etc.
AIUI, they have told Google to find a fix, or else.
I been living in SE Asia for few years each in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and really didn't notice that this is supposed to be like major political problem.
'Fraud' is the same smoke screen and excuse as 'protect the children from social media or pedophiles'.
One thing EU loves is regulation though, so I expect they will introduce preemptive regulations to enforce strict ID verification as well as regulations to fine big companies for breaching user privacy with strict ID verification policies.
https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parl...
"Next up in the ongoing trilogue, lawmakers will negotiate whether messenger and chat services, as well as app stores, will be legally obliged to implement age verification."
And Google thinks it can pull this ridiculous stunt.
Most people are too non-technical to understand why this is a bad thing even when it's explained to them. Plus, whatever administration is in power in the US has a lot of influence.
Trump has already said that he wouldn't tolerate regulation that affects American companies [1], painting regulation that happens in another country as something that will affect US citizens. (I mean if you use the GDPR as an example, it's not wrong. Think of cookie pop ups while browsing the web in the US)
I would like the the EU would go harder with their regulations, because it usually results in other countries or states following their lead, but I dont see that happening. Regulation has been painted as "bad", and we have at least 3 more years until that changes.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/12/tech/us-eu-tech-regulation-fi...
This lays bare the stupidity of applying the pay-or-consent law to only Facebook and not everyone. Every important newspaper in Europe has pay-or-consent. It does not matter that each one individually is smaller, the effect is the same.
The law was carefully crafted to ensure European businesses (newspapers) are not "gatekeepers" while ensuring American businesses (social networks) are. That fact did not go unnoticed in the rest of the world.
The newspaper market is very different, because there are many players and you can always go to a competitor. There are even newspapers that make all content available and ask an optional donation (e.g. Taz in Germany or to some extend The Guardian, who do not seem actively block ad blockers).
Do you see how quickly that argument can be flipped to support what google is doing here? Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if half the reason to to lock down phones is because governments keep pressuring them to do so.
The EU Commission is currently pushing the shitty EU Identity Wallet for mandatory age verification, and it requires GooglePlay Services to be installed for "anti-tampering". That also means a ban on non official versions of Android like LineageOS and GrapheneOS.
We need an urgent upgrade of the DMA v2.O, in the fast paced Omnibus package.
Feel free to post proposals here.
30 years ago, the Linux community fought the pre-installed Windows tax and mostly lost that fight.
* Chat control is toothless if users can simply side-load an app without snooping.
* The EU companies who successfully lobbied for regulations against Apple now see that the 15% tax is worth it when they can A/B test the counterfactual. So those companies no longer care if Google will do the same thing.
* The EU is now in an awkward position that it is ok for a newspaper to sell your personal info via pay-or-consent, but not for a social network to do it. Some will keep yammering on about "gatekeepers", but it's sort of an emperor has no clothes moment.
* Declaring that iPadOs is a gatekeeper (after it failed to meet the quantitative criteria for such) was another such emperor has not clothes moment. The whole "gatekeeper" narrative has turned into a farce.
* The people commenting on this forum are not even a rounding error in the EU electorate.
> It's not reasonable to expect consumers to figure out if the meat they buy is tainted, just as it's not to figure out if their phone spies on them, manipulates information, or sells their data (especially when there's a duopoly).
Indeed! Neither would it be reasonable for the sellers of meat to demand anonymity! If one sells tainted meat, he should be held accountable! We should identify him!
Yet, the creators and sellers of software for a General Purpose Computer (remember, that is the argument why phones should be regulated) demand that they should be above the law, anonymous and unaccountable!
Schrodinger's computing device: The one which is so vital to everyday life that we must not prohibit the user to run whatever software he likes, yet so unimportant that we have not a care in the world to identify any fraudster who might wish to distribute software.
1. enable developer mode
2. confirm you aren't being coached
3. restart your phone and reauthenticate
4. come back after 24 hours and unlock device
5. install app from unverified developer, option of enabling for 7 days or indefinitely
Personally I am hopeful that people work toward a completely new, non-Android OS. 15 GB of space on my phone, and 1.5 GB of RAM, is dedicated to Android OS alone. This design, and the control this company (and the mobile providers, and device manufacturers) have over the mobile world, is ridiculous. Let's start over.
The original Droid phone I used had only 256mb of memory, and could still multitask and run multiple apps at once with that limited memory. Its crazy how bloated things have become over the years.
Needing to turn Developer mode off and on every time I open the app is really annoying.
It was extra annoying when I needed to log all my phone's Bluetooth HCI protocol activity for a day for product development. I wouldn't be able to take that measurement using a separate dev-specific phone, because it wouldn't contain realistic usage.
Mobian, PureOS, postmarketOS already exist. Sent from my Librem 5.
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/08/elevating-...
> The scale of this threat is significant: our recent analysis found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play
Bald face lies are getting baldier.
So, we have a sideloaded app now. Which has been increasingly tricky for our users to install. The warning they get is hard to understand. Does this mean essentially the end of sideloading?
If you don't want to play their game, sideloading will get substantially harder.
Does anyone here have experience using Ubuntu Touch? That's the closest thing I've seen to "generic touchscreen linux" for mobile phone hardware. I'd love a device that works for multimedia, navigation, web browsing, and a handful of APKs like various chat apps (and really anything can can arbitrarily use the hardware), but it seems like tying a cellular modem to this ends up fucking up the whole dream because of carrier and manufacturer motivations/compensations.
So, what I'm being told is; there's lots of malware on Google Play? Thank goodness for f droid (for now).
I stopped because Pixel AOSP phones were actually decent.
Now I guess i'll be buying phones based on which I can flash with custom roms again.
Maybe not expose potential internet users to such as high obstacle if your goal is to get their eyeballs to buy your advertised product???
Will bypassing this bureaucracy be just a matter of buying a Chinese Android phone?
If you want to install APKs directly on Android phones selling in China, you'll face even more draconian restrictions imposed by both Chinese OEMs and Chinese government, e.g., cannot install telegram [1], cannot install VPNs [2], called by local police station after installing VPNs [3], and so on. And you do not have the freedom to even talk about these restrictions freely without getting sued or censored.
[1] https://xcancel.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/168915238841261670...
[2] https://xcancel.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/197843066556268971...
[3] https://xcancel.com/whyyoutouzhele/status/170299205759627676...
Oh and my three personal apps that I installed via adb (not released on playstore) - the moment they stop working on my phone or hassle me about verification, I will get in my car and go buy an iPhone.
Next will be to degoogle the rest of my life, which is luckily only gmail. Guess how long it will take me to port out? Less than two days.
I only let companies violate me once. Then I'm out.
Play store is the biggest piece of trash malware system that exists today, but us normal businesses have to pull teeth and spend days jumping through hoops to get an app out, but the playstore is filled with infinite garbage that rot childrens brains.
Wake up.
My dad on the other hand, who worked for Control Data in the 1980s regularly installs some of the scummiest apps imaginable, and they're all from the Play Store proper.
Launchers that don't actually launch things and serve ads. Apps that launch full screen ads while you're doing things saying your device is infected. Absolute trash.
Like maybe just maybe put some energy into going after the stuff in the Play Store first. As the Play Store exists now, it is unsafe.
That's presumably why there's a lockout period - it keeps a scammer from reasonably holding the line until they can pressure you to finish it.
...if the scammer can get the victim to physically drive to Target a buy a bunch of gift cards, what makes you think they need to install anything on your phone? Having RCE on a human is more useful than RCE on a device.
By making the victim believe that they're to blame for this innocent worker losing his job, they convince these people that they need to go outside normal financial systems to get the money back before anyone notices. Alternative scam scripts also have scammers pretend to be government officials threatening with fines and lawsuits, but the end goal is often to get into the victim's bank account in a way that the victim will tell the bank that everything is fine when fraud detection systems catch wire transfers or suspicious behaviour.
If the victim at any point opens up their official banking app, which scammers cannot control, they'll see that they never received the supposed "refund". With banks moving more and more functionality to apps, scammers can't pull the same tricks if they don't have access to your phone.
Scambaiting Youtubers have shown to be able to throw scammers of their guard by doing the most basic things. Disabling "inspect element" and cmd.exe will stop a scammer right in their tracks, because suddenly their phone script doesn't work any more.
If the victim needs to wait a full day, they'll be more likely to talk to someone. There are plenty of interviews with victims where they will say they realized their mistake hours or even minutes after it's too late. Stress and constant pressure is one of the primary means scammers employ to prevent people from thinking rationally so their obvious and ridiculous lies don't get spotted.
While I think developer verification is monumentally stupid and won't stop any serious scams, I do believe that the timeout measure Google makes people jump through does help.
>What Android versions will the developer verification requirements be enforced on? It will apply to all certified Android devices running Android 7 or higher. These updates are delivered through Google Play services to help maintain consistent security across the ecosystem. Last updated: March 23, 2026
So what's the solution then? At the same time, I'm curious how this ends up happening to end users. Enabling unknown sources is trivial in a way (it's just one check box and if you try to install an APK from, say, Firefox, it'll take you right there), but how are people even getting to that point??
I stuck with Android for years as a dev as I once did Android apps and occasionally do tinker.
This is my last Android phone and Jolla is my next phone.
A single for-profit company owning the full HW and SW stack? My trust in companies lately is at a lifetime low. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
For students and hobbyists: To keep Android accessible to everyone, we're building a free, no government ID required, limited distribution account so you can share your work with up to 20 devices. You only need an email account to get started. Sign up for early access. We’ll send invites in June.
Especially in countries like Thailand or Brazil were it is implemented now, just imagine that if Trump decide to go crazy any day, suddenly you would not be allowed to create or have user install your apps normally, just like that...
This is a major course correction that doesn't kill F-Droid. A one time 24 hour hoop to jump through and then never again is monumentally better than losing F-Droid forever.
You take a step forward.
He takes a step back.
"Meet me in the middle" says the unjust man.
I recommend Cory Doctorow's talk on why this is a serious problem for society:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
Every application use for such people should be supervised by a government official trained to ensure you are not hurting yourself.
This way people who want to use AI, smartphones, or the Internet can do so if they’re healthy and the mentally disabled can be protected. We know that this need exists because even on this “Hacker” News forum everyone gets very upset when a mentally disabled person gets injured after AI use.
Unfortunately. I talked about this a bit on LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/1063741/
The problem is very, very real. I don't doubt that Google also has ulterior motives, but in this case they _are_ justified at least partially.
We have moved away from an existential threat to F-Droid to a speed bump which lets it live. As is often the case, it's a both can be true situation in that I don't like the ratcheting up of restrictions, but think possible without contradiction to note how the change over time has impacted F-Droid compared to prior iterations of the proposed policy.
It disappoints me that people on HN aren't sufficiently in control of their own attention to the point of being able to show up to that conversation, as the fate of F-Droid has been central to this saga if you've been following it over previous HN threads.
Google says they don't intend to do that, but even if I believe that's their current intention, they have a strong incentive to do otherwise in the future. Incentives predict outcomes more reliably than intentions.
I say it's pretending because scammers are good at shifting tactics. If convincing users to install malware ceases to be the path of least resistance, they'll convince users to install legitimate remote access utilities, hand over credentials directly, or some other scheme I haven't thought up because I'm not a scammer.
The reality is far worse than that. Remember FBI vs Apple? That defense came down to Apple not having software in place that could facilitate the demand being made of them. If they'd had such a system they would presumably have been required to comply.
The government can presumably get an illegal app forcibly removed from an app store but at present you could still install it yourself. With this system they could compel Google to block it entirely.
Bought a new phone? Moved from iPhone to Android? Want help from your friend/family member/librarian/other to setup your new phone for getting apps? Sorry, you need to come back a day later before you can actually use it.
Guess what the normal/non-tech user does in this 24hr period? Go to Play Store, install a bunch of apps, forget that you had the desire to use an alternative.
This indeed does make F-Droid no longer a tool for normal people, but only a tool for those willing to do a bunch of "Advanced" things on their phone. By definition, not regular users.
Newspapers should only report news at a minimum 7 days after the fact to ensure accurate reporting.
Toasters should lock everything in until it's completely room temperature to avoid accidental burns.
These are serious problems.
How it's going: almost everything is signed, even pirated apps.
????
Based on the reaction here, it's obvious I'm missing something here, but I just don't see any real reason devs are feeling like they are being driven away. It's hardly more of an inconvenience than enabling developer mode, and I feel like we all get why they hide the developer settings menu behind that.
Crazy idea, maybe they shouldn't be using those then. Maybe they should use email? Or god forbid a TOTP app. Or perhaps webauthn via the platform provided authenticator.
They very clearly aren't behaving in good faith. That's why the harsh sentiment.