I’m seeing a bunch of posts about how Google has decided to stop allowing side loading on Android phones. But the EU relatively recently forced Apple to do the exact opposite. Won’t they just do the same thing for Android phones? Sure, people outside the EU market will lose this ability as a default, but presumably you can just order a Euro phone on ebay if you are outside the EU.
So why is everyone panicking? I think Google is definitely being shitty by trying to do this, and I support the development of other open source alternatives. I like the fact that this could be a big wakeup call for that effort. But I am wondering if this is also not as big of a deal as everyone is making out.
I trust f-droid too. Their approach to building apps is truly at risk. But as of the Google blog article, installing apks is not affected as long as they are signed.
The apk on f-droid already must be signed by the developer or f-droid. The problem is developers don’t want anything to do with google. If they wanted to submit their personal details to Google, they’d already use the play store?
https://f-droid.org/2023/09/03/reproducible-builds-signing-keys-and-binary-repos.html
“as long as they are signed”
As long as you want to pay the fee and have your identity and address verified and get big brothers permission to have it signed. A lot of people who make apks don’t want to do all that so they can freely release their apk for the appreciation of anyone who would want to use it. “As long as they are signed” is nearly gatekeeping away anyone who wants to make a program without monetizing or gaining from it in any way.
I’m going to go ahead and say that ‘side loading’ is something that does not require approval or authorization from the owner of the system that does the ‘regular loading’. So if it requires google authorization, it’s not ‘side loading’, it’s alternative regular loading. Your attitude is very ‘segregation won’t affect you if you’re white’.