Fear, uncertainty, and doubt is a propaganda technique that tech companies have used for long against open source and competitors. The propaganda is to pretend that a 24 hour cooldown and making it difficult to install externals apps is for the good of the user meanwhile stealing their data and giving it to anybody that pays for it.

People are getting hurt. Mass spying should stop now.

1) make it optional

2) don't put it on a timer. What's most damning, in my opinion, is that this is the very definition of a bait-and-switch. Any rational person thinks this won't apply to their existing phone because it came before the rollout, right? It's only android 15 and onward? No. That's wrong, it'll apply to YOUR phone. Google. Non-Google. Doesn't matter. Android 12, 13, 14? Nope applies to them all. That's just an accident then?

It's just a public confession that none of these organizations - not the carriers, not the government, and not Evil Google, are fit for the responsibilities they've claimed.

The propaganda I'm seeing is coming from Google. I can't tell you how many times lately I've seen ads on TV/streaming pushing the security narrative for Play Store. Google knows what it is doing is blatantly anti-consumer and they very much want public sentiment to think it's not.

There will always be means to scam individuals through technology. Pulling stunts like this is not justified simply because it closes off one means of doing so.

The real problem here is not that Google is doing this bad thing. The real problem is that they can do this bad thing. They shouldn't have this power. Something needs to be done to rain in Google and take back Android as an open platform.

The best solution would have been to be able to mark ANY alternative app store like fdroid as trusted and no such cooldown period would hit every time people install an app from there. This avoids that people can immediately use installed apps downloaded from an arbitrary URL but at the same time keeps the alternative app stores as a good alternative. Google decided to play unfair again.

Full disclosure, I am an iPhone user in part because I personally like living in the walled garden. But I also acknowledge that it has its downsides. I have a separate Android device just for language learning because the open source language learning app ecosystem is basically nonexistent on Apple’s locked-down platform. I’m not thrilled about the possibility of that ecosystem withering and dying on Android, too.

> You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.

I would turn this right around and say that until the proponents of this measure acknowledge that the Play Store is not safe and is in fact a primary vector for scams, you're just doing propaganda.

The correct move is to remove the (icon for) the google app store from inexperienced user's phones. (I'm dead serious, and it works)

Unfortunately, that's exactly the move that now gets sabotaged by this google change.

So sure I'll acknowledge the very real risk to users that this is meant to mitigate. It does in fact marginally mitigate the precise narrow risk they state, but introduces a fatal flaw in its place. Probably unwise to let naive users use android at all anymore after this.

The vast majority of tech support scams come through apps on the Play Store. Not only that, but malicious apps get approved on the Play Store constantly.

There is no reason to take any claim that this change is meant to mitigate scams seriously, because there's no evidence to support that it makes a noticeable dent in such activity.

What this change does noticeably and impactfully do, is prevent, via chilling effects, users from being able to use their phones in ways that could lose Google and its partner vendors post-sales revenue.

As you said, serving people should be the end in itself, and this change doesn't do that - it hurts people.

There are people at my gym who often have very bad form who I worry about. I will occasionally chat them up so they're not, for example, shoulder pressing with their arms outside of the scapular plane or benching without any arch in their back. Sometimes they appreciate it and ask me more questions. Sometimes they give me a terse 'thanks' and go back to doing it the way they want to do it.

If somehow every gym started forbidding people from using any equipment with which they could harm themselves unless they could prove, with a 24h cooling off period, that they knew the form and dangers in detail, I'm sure it would probably save a few people from suffering temporary injuries. I think it would also drive a lot of people away from any kind of sustained resistance training and be an overall net negative for public health.

Personally, I don't think such a nanny-state implementation is necessary? That you should be able to easily toggle off such a feature if you like and what happens to you happens. Perhaps there should be a 'tech-illiterate' mode toggled on by default but easily toggled off if you know how to access Developer Options with a little more forewarning about common scams. Perhaps gyms (or Google) could pay people to proactively assist and help people they see as the most vulnerable to certain kinds of exploits. Perhaps there are more pro-social, less-draconian ways of tackling this.

Simply add a setting to the phone for the technologically illiterate and/or young and old.

I can't even imagine how locked down and terrible the internet would be if we had this rhetoric around in the 90s.

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30 cents out of every dollar, you say?