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.
You seem to not know what you’re talking about. I trust F-Droid and their interpretation of what Google is doing and what I have read from Google about what they’re doing, and you aren’t quite grasping it.
No, this is correct. What F-Droid worries about is that a lot of open source apps aren’t signed and that the developers don’t want to verify their id with Google, which would prevent distribution.
All APK from f-droid are signed. Just not with a key approved by Google.
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
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’.