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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

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izacus·

Are you really unable to comprehend just how small of a userbase F-droid represents for Android ecosystem?

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If it’s that small, how does killing it help anything?

Nobody said it did. Google is not doing this to kill F-Droid.

Google already knows whether an app is being installed from an app store, such as fdroid, or not.

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.

Why do you think they are doing it?

To stop scammer-guided malware installation, and probably those "download whatsappupdate.apk for free new emoji" ads that pop up all the time.

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.

They don't care about F-Droid but they do care to choke out any potential competitors to their ecosystem before they can get a foothold. See their behavior surrounding device certification for example. They want to abuse the network effects of their ecosystem to prevent consumers from leaving. This is just more of that - vendor lock-in masquerading as an unfortunate necessity.

F-Droid still works the same as it did before. This just means that McDonald's can distribute its apps on its website without showing a scary warning on install on Google's Android builds.

No it doesn’t. You will now have to follow a lengthy process before being allowed to install apps from F-Droid.

To defeat scammers. Not everything is a conspiracy.

Likely true, but also many technically oriented people (myself included) would turn away from Android if f-droid stopped working. And I would actively start recommending friends and family against it. What is the benefit of Android at this point? an extended Ads platform, controlled by Google.

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