HN Reader

Again, technological measures against this kind of attacks on ownership rights fall short and are probably what conglomerates want since it keeps the tech people busy in a self-satisfying "fight" against the big corporation.

You need legislation.

This story with restricting users is a similar one to Manifest V3 in Chromium.

But we don't have anything like FF as an alternative to go from Android. Especially considering banks require "certified OS".

All this has me wondering: what's the future of chroot-based tools like proot-distro? No app store here, just PPAs. Can largely run whatever the hell I want, provided it's distributed for the OS I'm currently running.

Based.

I wonder how badly Google's shenanigans will affect sales of new Android devices too. I've been looking to buy a foldable at some point, but I'll have to make entirely sure it won't be of an effectively broken (too new) Android version.

Wouldn't it be nice if, in this time of feeding our IDs to the machine, there would be someone who would also offer some nice and easy way to identify ourselves digitally? Maybe someone who sits on all that unverified advertisement tracking data already and somebody who has an AI agent to feed?

I'm sure everybody would profit from that...

https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...

> This library is licensed under the GPLv3.

If the intention was to make it easier to spread the word, you've already failed.

Anyway, this whole library should have been a copy-pastable snippet for a dialog or toast (what's with the duplicate code?); the only value added is the translation, which most app devs already have a pipeline for.

The code part is so trivial that I suspect it doesn't even meet the legal bar for copyright protection in many jurisdictions.

> Google has announced that, starting in 2026/2027, all apps on certified Android devices will require the developer to submit personal identity details directly to Google. Since the developers of this app do not agree to this requirement, this app will no longer work on certified Android devices after that time.

I don’t have any hope that this will sway Google, but at least the users are being warned.

A little bit overkill to use a dependency to just show a dialog. I agree that Google ia making Android less and less free with every new release, but show a damn dialog, no need to use this.

If this library is licensed under GPL, you can't really use it without relicensing your entire project, right?

GPLv3 seems like a quite restrictive license for such a project. I would assume they want that note to be spread everywhere and while about user's freedom, the freedom for that code may be less relevant.

Nice timing. I’d probably just ship a simple in-app dialog instead of a whole dep, but the message matters. For non-root users, will ADB + “Unknown sources” remain the escape hatch once the new checks roll out?

> Add the JitPack repository to your root build.gradle

How much MB (kb?) does this dependency add to apk?

google seem to have the multi-pronged attack on android devs going on atm. They are seemingly trying to take down as many apps and dev accounts as possible.. Anyone know why?

1. doxx yourself of they kill your account

2. re-build every app with pointless newer api version literally every year or it gets taken down.

3. Push an update or a new app or they kill your account.

..

My guess is enshittification, some random exec is trying to save a few pennies in server and storage costs.

..

I'd also say that google makes so much money from ads and data-brokering that everything else they do is not vital for their survival and thus undergoes a sort of "genetic drift" where they just make random decisions.

Didn't Google say that they're gonna provide an escape hatch for students and hobbyists? So, best case scenario, we just need to tap some label 5 times to enable side-loading again.

"Copyright GPL"

I don't think this meets the bar for copyrightable code. Copyright protects creative expression. Displaying a single dialogue does not take creative expression, and pretty much any developer given the task would produce code identical to this.

What would be my options as an end user who does not want to root his device

Rad. That's the way to do it.

"Avoid Google. Don't buy Google products, especially their phones."

Money is the corporate language, especially for Big Tech, which is always several steps ahead of legislation.