Google/Alphabet's been slowly tightening all sorts of things. Of course "security" is the term bandied around. Of course, I'd say "security" is overloaded - is it security for the user, or security for google AGAINST the user? I think it's the second.
And we also have no valid 3rd party phone platform. In reality, there was Windows Phone, but that was even worse locked down.
There's a few Linux phone projects. Pinephone is an embarrassment and an abject failure. I think the UbuntuPhone is dead as well.
Once they do this, it'll probably be a while before a proper Linux phone hits the market.
The reason this argument isn't holding water and swaying popular opinion, in my opinion, is because everything else in life is heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted.
"It's my car, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold, either for driving, or removing the catalytic converter, or changing the tuning to be able to roll coal, or uninstalling the seat belts.
"It's my kitchen, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't sell my baked goods to my neighbors without a license, or replace the interior of my kitchen without a permit.
"It's my home, I should be able to do whatever I want with it!" does not hold when I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent, and broaden chance of success.
The technologist sees licensing from Google to develop Android apps as tyranny. The average person asks "where have you been? What can you do without a license?"
I think people should be able to build a deck without state consent. I think people should be able to sell to their neighbors without the health department watching. I think people should be able to start a small business without needing IRS filings at first. I think a small business might need OSHA exceptions across the board for the first few employees. I even think, yes, that allowing some idiots to roll coal is worth more than tightly regulating car repairs and controlling car repair equipment. And I think, to most people, these freedoms matter more than digital sovereignty.
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Edit, posting too fast, cannot reply directly: In that case, that's a great argument for regulating app distribution, we need to protect people from scam apps. We can't possibly neglect people who don't know better about the risks of sideloading.
I'm sure you wouldn't say, "I just want to do whatever I want with code, while stopping my neighbor from building a dangerous deck," with a straight face, right?
It's cool and all for your neighbors to sell you raw milk until that case of brucellosis and staph kills off the breadwinner in your family and you're caught up for the rest of your life suing a family farm out of existence.
And that deck is great and all, until you go over to your buddies party where you're all drinking and 15 crowd on to that deck that suddenly fails leading to you being a paraplegic.
And small business OSHA exceptions are great until big companies sub out all their work to tiny contractors that end up dying without proper PPE.
And some idiot rolling coal is fine until you're the one trying to figure out how you got lung cancer even though you didn't ever smoke.
Libertarianism is what happen when you don't think in systems.
I think the relevant difference is that it has real-world consequences for other people. And the consequences are likely to scale with the magnitude of the audience, meaning that it is bigger players that should face stiffer regulation. And yes, I think some of the examples you give should also be allowed.
Catalytic converters are there because they reduce the emissions your car produces. Those emissions get out into the air and affect everyone around you, and (over time, potentially) everyone on the planet. Rules around selling baked goods exist to ensure you don't sell bread made with rotten eggs or something that would make people sick. (And there are now "home kitchen" laws in some places that do allow you to do this anyway.) Installing a new electrical outlet has potential fire risks which could affect nearby buildings. Building a deck has potential safety consequences, but I imagine there are many jurisdictions where you can do that without a permit, and even more where you can get away with doing so even though it's technically not allowed.
Me installing a tic-tac-toe game from F-droid doesn't have the same kind of ripple effects on other people. It probably has much smaller such effects than installing a mainstream app like Facebook.
> Unless we agree to fight for freedom everywhere, the only logical excuse is that the digital world doesn't have real world consequences, except that it increasingly patently does now. It's no surprise to me then that the argument does not resonate. That does mean we may have to allow people to have an uncomfortable level of freedom, across the board, in order to be logically consistent.
The bigger you are, the more everything you do affects other people. To my mind the "logically consistent" approach is to impose greater restrictions on almost all sorts of behavior the larger and more powerful the entity performing the behavior. By this logic, it would be Google that is restricted from changing its policy like this, simply because it is big.
Your ability to distribute your app anonymously absolutely meets the definition of real-world consequences for other people.
I personally find it absurd we accept that the government regulates food (people can't detect bad food), and hair cutting (people can't detect inexperienced people with scissors), but the right to anonymous app distribution is sacrosanct, as though food quality is less transparent than app quality. It's not - all of these licenses need to be let go of on the small scale.
The butcher says that vegetables is bad for your health, and you should only eat meat.
Google is full of shit.
Meanwhile I can download anything with confidence on F-Droid, the subject of the article.
You can though. No one will stop you from doing either of those things.
> I can't build a deck, add an addition, or even install a new electrical outlet, without permission. Have you ever tried putting something in your front yard?
A deck or addition might draw attention and run afoul of some rule depending on where you live, but a lot of places won't care. If you want to put in an outlet, the world's your oyster. The only real consideration is if you're worried you may do it wrong and may run into insurance denials after a catastrophe or something. You don't actually need anyone's permission. And it's October; I have decorations in my front yard right now. No one was consulted about this.
It's like my air conditioner broke a couple weeks ago, so I ordered a capacitor off amazon and fixed it. I've never touched one of these things before, but the only one stopping you from unscrewing it and going to town is you. If you passed high school you ought to have a basic understanding of how stuff works and be able to do some light reading to make sure you're doing this correctly and safely. LLMs make this even easier.
These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if your AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts. Or even more on point, required someone registered with e.g. Carrier (not actually any kind of professional certification; just someone gatekept by a business trying to monopolize things).
It's literally illegal in many US states and countries to do so. In my home state, MN, it is tightly regulated what kinds of "cottage food" you are allowed to sell.
You're confusing ability with legality. Try loading up some food you cooked in your kitchen and selling it out of your car, door-to-door, and watch what happens. This is despite, for most people, judging the health risks of food being wildly easier than the security risks of a sideloaded app.
> These phone restrictions, by contrast, would be like if you AC or electrical panel somehow required a licensed professional to activate new parts.
That already exists in car repair; with key reprogrammers and especially anything engine-tuning being restricted to licensed individuals. Also, good luck messing with your catalytic converter, without the ECU by law detecting it and getting very angry. Take my relative's diesel truck from 2015 - a single failed sensor in the exhaust, and it caps itself as low as 30 MPH.
Ability vs. legality is the point; these things in practice aren't that heavily regulated, licensed, and restricted, and in fact no one will check up on you or try to stop you at all unless you piss someone off by somehow turning it into an annoyance. I don't know why you'd even think to check whether most of the stuff you listed is legal.
Using car restrictions (which are obviously mostly anti-consumer, especially for EVs) as some justification for similar actions in phones is interesting, to say the least.
That's worse, not better. Freedom by definition isn't subject to the whims of my neighbors.
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Edit, posting too fast, because I can't reply directly: What you are advocating for is a police state. Think about it:
1. Laws should be intentionally overbroad: Make everything illegal, then only enforce when something goes wrong
2. Competence is determined retroactively: You only find out if you were "allowed" to do something after a disaster
3. Rights depend on outcomes: You had the right to wire that outlet... unless it sparked, then retroactively you didn't
4. Selective enforcement is good, actually: Laws that could be used against anyone but usually aren't are fine
This is nonsense.
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Like I said,
> I'm not in favor of extreme authoritarian laws being on the books at all for their abuse potential
I'm not in favor of that. But obviously a police-state-on-the-books is better than a real-actual-police-state. Duh. Laws that are never enforced that say women can't wear pants or gay relationships are illegal are stupid. I like when legislators do "cleanup" bills to delete invalid laws and keep things tidy. The same laws if they are enforced are oppressive.
In practice I'm not sure that "you can do dangerous things as long as you are competent and are not negligent and don't injure others" is a bad guiding principle? Like yeah if it turns out you were not competent or you were negligent, then we (retroactively) say you should have at least known enough to not do that. Sounds reasonable. Especially if the law is effectively "thing is dangerous. Only people who know what they're doing should do it". It's on you then to know enough to know whether you know what you're doing. If you don't know whether you're competent enough, then I suppose you're not.
It would be better to have that explicitly be the law, but having it be the de facto law works well enough. It's sort of the same "if you know you know" kind of thing, but I guess with a different psychological filter where people are more likely to default to "I don't realize I can do this"? Personally I'd prefer we not infantilize people, so it's better to encourage them to better themselves and learn a skill rather than discouraging them and saying they "can't" do it, but maybe the type of people who allow themselves to be infantilized are exactly the ones you don't want to do it anyway.
No, you are. Google's restricting the ability, by decree. Laws restrict the legality, in certain places, by democratic consensus.
There's a lovely grandma in my neighborhood who has been doing exactly this for years. She sells the best tamales around. Just sayin'.
But yes, how viable and/or legal this is depends on where you live.
Following your rationale, we just actually need the government to step in and regulate that Google cannot do what they want with Android.
Since I live in the EU, that's exactly what I am hoping for.
Anytime similar argument is brought up for Apple, people always say "Their platform, their rules". Isnt that the case here?
My position when Apple was throwing a hissy fit because of EU regulations is that Apple should go fuck itself.
Now, likewise, I hope the EU assrapes Google with fines if they move on with this bullshit.
Why? On what grounds? It hurts upsets a few people?
I, and many others, rely on being able to slideload apps on Androids.
Government crackdown is the scarier thing. It's suspicious seeing both "private" companies locking things down, while at the same time the US govt is increasingly making special threats and deals with big corps, and also Europe is trying to clamp down on encrypted messaging. So yeah the outcry over Android seems justified. Wouldn't be surprised if WEI comes back too.
Apple told users in advance that they would be buying into a walled garden.
Google, on the other hand, fraudulently marketed Android as open.
Fraud is illegal. Walled gardens are not.
I find this position hard to reconcile.
and followup development is a week old now also
OEMs may be forced to do the same, but 3rd party ROMs will not.
I do agree this cuts deeply for F-Droid.
Originally, device makers who used Android themselves were contractually prohibited from manufacturing devices for any company that forked Android, for instance.
Google are also making that harder, at least for the Pixel line by no longer publishing the device tree as part of AOSP.
I know Fairphone do publish a buildable tree - though it's not yet available for their latest device - does anyone else?
Do we really want a future where 99.9% of people's pocket computers must ask for permission from one of two companies to run something on a device?
If they want to have a closed platform, do what Microsoft did with Xbox and create something new.
Part of the hardware:
- Can be restricted to specific devices
- Must be available under GPLv3, including anti-tivoization provisions (forced bootloader unlock)
- May not attempt to use TPMs, DRM, or other systems to support assertions about client devices
Not part of the hardware:
- May only interact with hardware through public, documented, APIs in the "part of hardware" category
- Using alternatives from competitors must be fully supported
- When made by a company that also makes hardware, must also work on competitors' hardware (at least one, more if technically feasible)
- May be under a proprietary license
- Must not attempt to assert anything regarding the hardware, so things like Google Safteynet are now illegal. Security boundary must be shifted to consider client devices insecure
This is, I think, a good compromise to allow software developers to get paid without taking away ownership of hardware devices. Developers can be paid for "part of the hardware" software with money from selling the hardware, and "not part of the hardware" software can be trivially commercialized under a proprietary license. But, there is no way for a user to end up unable to control their hardware, or incentivized to configure it in a specific way.
Also, things like TPMs, Secure Boot, etc, are good security tools which can be used by an end user to get security guarantees over their device.
I use Secure Boot with Linux because, when done right, it means you can get full disk encryption without gaps (at best, without secure boot, you have an un-encrypted bootloader on a flash drive which decrypts your disk and boots your machine, and this is a clunky setup).
I use GrapheneOS's hardware attestation to alert me if something compromises my android phone's operating system.
Now it's true that these features are abused by companies like Google to force you to run a blessed Android build if you want to use e.g. Google Pay (which is the only mobile payment option in e.g. the UK). But it's important to separate the technology from the bad actors abusing it.
https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration...
> The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.
I don't understand the argument.
The other half is suggesting they could offer uploading the apps put into f-droid to the store (under an f-droid account I'd guess) but they immediately discard that option since it would make f-droid the exclusive distributor, taking something from the dev.
jmclnx•1h ago
edit: fixed spelling
exe34•1h ago
seba_dos1•1h ago
MYEUHD•1h ago
Does the phone last an entire day on a single charge?
beanjuiceII•50m ago
kop316•7m ago
With a Librem 5, its 12ish hours on idle, 20 hours on suspend, and 4-5 hours light usage.
yjftsjthsd-h•58m ago
amelius•1h ago
john01dav•1h ago
amelius•57m ago
beanjuiceII•51m ago
yjftsjthsd-h•54m ago
gowld•33m ago
cosmic_cheese•32m ago
Good North America market availability sure would help too. There’s been stuff like Sailfish that seemed interesting in the past but didn’t have easily purchasable devices available in the US, completely precluding development for the platform for a significant number of devs.
SAI_Peregrinus•31m ago