Android

Yeah at least it's better than Apple's approach, where you have to connect your phone to a PC once every 7 days to reactivate Developer Mode. Don't have a computer? Fuck you!

That said, I have zero faith in Google sticking with the compromise solution in the long run. They're going to try to force the change on everyone again in the future, once they've broken us down a bit more.

But they did this knowing that at this point there is not a viable alternative. It's both monopoly, vendor lock, eee and enshittification all at once..

So the way compute used to work, is you could install any program you want from anywhere. You could buy a program from a web site or copy a disk and install the program.

Smartphones have been around since the late 1990s in various forms, it used to be, you could just install whatever you want.

Then, in 2008, Apple released the iPhone app store, and it was a closed space, a "walled garden". You can only install apps on their phone if they approve them.

Google decided to join the phone race and released a phone where one could still install applications from anywhere, not just their store. There are multiple stores like others have mentioned, or you can download an APK file from anywhere and install it on your phone.

Part of their behavior since is slightly open to interpretation, as the technology is now used by everyone, not just tech nerds. People could install "bad" programs, and they could lose money, cell networks could be compromised, etc.

It likely costs a lot of companies a lot of money to deal with dumb users doing stupid shit. So from one perspective, making it extremely hard to install unknown programs from anywhere will curb that expense.

It could be a defensive move, as LLMs now allow anyone to write computer software with very little knowledge of it, and it is just bad timing.

On the other hand, since the beginning of computers, the owner of the machine could run whatever software they wanted.

This move by Google is basically making it so there is NO mobile compute platform that the owner of the device actually owns, and is allowed to do with their hardware what they want. Apple or Google, that is it. Apple had always been closed, which should have been made illegal, but I digress.

It has been a slippery slope with Android for almost 2 decades, and this move is basically the end of the ability for free humans to install free software from anywhere on the hardware they own and paid anywhere up to $3000 for.

Basically a huge dive for personal freedom on a planetary scale, decided by one corporation.

The recourse has been removal.

And the solution proposed is not requiring identification specifically for Play store developers, but any developer at all.

Yeah, I'm not dragging a laptop around everywhere with me to search business opening hours / locations etc

I do like being able to look things up on a browser and I use the gps mapping a lot but most of the other stuff is fluff.

didnt they drop it like decade ago?

Android's own appeal probably died somewhere in 2013 or 2014, but it has always kept strong for a very simple reason: phone prices. You could either pay 700 dollars for an iphone, or 200 for an android

I don't think that's really the main appeal, honestly. The main appeal is just that it isn't Apple. And were I someone who didn't care about the installation of third-party applications, I wouldn't be running to buy an iPhone. Android is just plain more customizable and if you need a quality of life feature, you're probably going to find some way to have it.

That was it before they got a solid fanbase. Now the main appeal is that they are mostly cheaper phones.

There have been talks in Europe about how we are dependent on American tech for our digital infrastructure. Some politicians even pushing for an alternative to Apple and Google. I hope everyone else wakes up before it's too late.