If the legal system dictates that open = monopoly and closed = fair game, then you get dumb shit like this.
Probably one of the dumbest rulings in tech ever, but few people know about it. Basically set precedent to never share your platform if you don't want legal scrutiny.
https://linmob.net/my-setup-with-danctnix-archlinuxarm/ (2021)
Two types of people will benefit: 1. the genuine & naive who want to help but don't make much progress; 2. those who attended Harvard.
I'd just turn off my phone before midnight, boot it into fastboot and reflash lineage 2 days later, missing the window for them to push anything. No gapps btw.
I think what's interesting, and what our grandchildren will look back on, was how naive the early internet was. There was almost this sense of "the government is powerless" whether it be piracy or jailbreaking or casual death threats [8647 style] or who knows what else. Combined with also a sense that devices will always be exploitable, there's always a way around, resistance from government and corporations will always be futile.
There is a very concerning amount of illegal apps/scams distributed through ads that I've casual users install somewhat banally with the aid of short walkthroughs.
Any sufficiently advanced user is barely affected by this, as the procedure is just complex enough to block average people from getting scammed/using illegal services unknowingly, but simple enough to barely be an inconvenience for anyone who cares enough and can go through it.
24h delay is not all of it, there's developer verification.
I believe this is usually referred to as "boiling the frog".
Any sources for this claim? I don't buy it.
You can disagree with the tradeoff, but if you don't acknowledge it you're just doing propaganda.
Personally, I think the 24h cooldown is an excellent compromise to allow user freedom while slowing down attackers sufficiently to mitigate the harm.
Tech is cool, but it's not an end in itself. Serving people should be. And if people are getting hurt, it's not working well, even if those people are not the ones that read Hacker News.
I think this was probably a very easy decision for Google after they weighed benefits and harms to users and developers.
Also. I regularly remove malware from people's android phones pro bono in and around my community. It all comes from the play store.
They are recommending installing F-droid.. and not accepting android's demands. Its time to have open source smart phone operating system that can not be taken hostage.
Also people should and could use the browser interface rather than apps for their banking but certain applications don't exist in browser world.
otherwise my next phone will be linux
whats the way forward?
You can't just click a random apk in a website and install it. At least without the 24 hour wait workaround, done once per device.
Almost certainly that would reset this. Why would it not?
> What if I wipe data in play services?
No idea. Is this a thing people do?
> Will a future silent play services update conveniently break my p2p messaging app during a protest?
Google can already do that today.
Even with Android becoming much more closed, it's still more open than Apple.
Not true if one pays up ($99/yr), in which case the interval becomes one year. Also apps that sign and install other apps with one's cert exist.
I had "sideloaded" all the APKs for the software I used on the old phone and saved the APKs. Moving to a new phone was just a matter of loading all the software and copying my rsync'd backups onto the new phone. It was wonderful. Just like moving to a new PC.
I guess I'm happy I got to have this experience for a little while.
Edit: I've found a few apps I can't used because they require Play attestation. Eventually I'll hit one of those that I need and I'll be at an impasse irrespective of this particular power grab.
1. You own your device and can install anything you want on it (what we have today)
2. Google gently yanks you away from the simple workflows, leaving you with ADB or their 24 hour hoop to jump through. If you opt for the second, you get a choice between allowing 'unverified' installs for 7 days or indefinitely. Huh, that's weird, who would ever pick the 7 day option, right?
3. The dust settles and some time passes. Google decides that the indefinite option is just way too dangerous, the users are not safe if they are allowed to use this freedom. They'll just claim there's countless clueless grandmas getting entangled in multi-day-long scams that hinge on the sideloading feature, and they simply can't let them suffer so much. They will generously disable the 'indefinite' option.
4. 7 days may still be too much, maybe the sensible decision is to move to a 24 hour countdown per app. I mean, if you want it so badly, you have to work for it - that means you'll have more time to mull over the security of every single app you put on your phone.
5. Huh, for some reason it looks like almost no users are installing apps from outside Google Play anymore. We'll keep the feature on life support for a while, and then retire the legacy unverified installation workflow, to be replaced by a temporary limited permission for verified developers to briefly install their own in-development apps on their device. That ought to be enough.
This pathway for extinguishing features that are inconvenient for massive corporations isn't new. I really do not understand how everyone supporting Google's side here doesn't see this, and why they're so willing to wholeheartedly and without reservation believe them on matters of security where pushing one opinion also happens to conveniently align with their profit motive.
App takedown requests from India were ignored but similar cases from China were not. Coming soon to a country near you.
Concretely in my case, I read all the fdroid materials that were linked to from the fdroid pop-ups and they left me hanging, trying to understand what was actually happening. I finally looked it up, and what I found was a lot more clear and actionable than what was communicated by, for example, Fdroid. Obviously Google's motives are clear, but I had to work pretty hard to figure out what was going on.
This style of communication is what will will undo graphene and fdroid and all these other organizations because it's just not useful, professional or appealing.
Will not apply if updates are blocked
Good to have old phones, i.e., not primary phone, where user can block updates
Some users may want a portable, pocket-sized computer that the user can reasonably control (old phone) in addition to one controlled by Google or Apple (primary phone)
For some users, the "threat model" may be Google and the long list of governments, corporations, etc. who partner with Google
Maybe some users just want relief from data collection, surveillance and ads
Not every user is the same
Some (not all) users may be willing to sacrifice some alleged "security" provided by an ad services company (wtf) in exchange for more _user control_
You will still be able to install unsigned APKs, but the first-time procedure to unlock the ability will include a 24 hour wait. After that, unsigned APKs can still be installed as usual
And APKs outside of the Play store can still be distributed unsigned, subject to the 24 hour wait for Play Protect devices
We need a truly open-source os, everything else is going to be a patch over a bullet hole.
Thus, we should absolutely expect next steps for Android to slowly go into walled garden mode: no dev unlocking for certain devices, dev unlock after mandatory KYC, etc, etc.
> Starting in 2027, a silent update, nonconsensually pushed by Google, will block every Android app whose developer hasn't registered with Google, signed their contract, paid up, and handed over government ID.
Android is owned by Google, so in all fairness they can do whatever they want, so they don't need anyone consent.
That's how it's done with domain names, with security advisories and disclosures, etc. That they don't do it for developers shows that it's about control and anti-competitive business behavior (preventing other app stores).
I don't think Google is doing this out of some egotistical obsession over "control," it's more that developers and FOSS enthusiasts are a vanishingly small fraction of their customer base.
There are plenty of problems with walled gardens, but IMO this isn't one of them.
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.
A scammer managed to convince a relative to share their screen during a Whatsapp video call. Luckly, said relative didn't use banking apps on the phone, the bank rejected as suspicious the transaction on the computer which would have sent money to the scammer, and the relative asked me for help before going to the ATM to unblock the account (I then contacted the bank and had them fully block the account as a precaution, and told my relative to go to the bank branch the next day to change the passwords and unblock the account).
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.
Small businesses getting blocked by Gmail, Twilio, etc. for legitimate activities is constant.
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.
And then you have the option:
- unverified packages either temporarily (7 days)
- or indefinitely
Official docs here:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...
I have many coworkers who work very hard on this problem.
The claim that Google does not care about ads integrity runs counter to my experience.
Google may care a lot, but if my experience is any indicator they don't care enough.
Yes I understand that Google says they care a lot about scams and that there are people there working on blocking scams. But those are words. We need to look at money.
There is a very simple way that Google can block basically all scam ads: review all ads manually before approval, and allow no dynamic changes. They won’t do this, because it would implode their business model.
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.
Why should that be a concern to a phone OS provider? A concern so important that they are willing to cripple couple billions of devices.
Nobody reads warnings or errors. StackOverflow is full of questions where someone pastes a clear error message and asks what they have to do when the very error message tells them the solution.
Also, scammers just tell people to ignore warnings and they do it. If someone is able to convince you that your child is in danger and that you have to bypass all warnings to help them, you _will_ do it.
Should Google be less than an asshole in all things? Yes.
I think there’s this like “something must be done now!” attitude of self-important, busybodies I can’t get behind… even if they’re right.
Why have people convinced themselves into thinking now is the most important thing in the world? That if it doesn’t happen now so that it makes me happy instantly it isn’t an option?
Evolution; social, tech, biological, legal, just fucking takes time, and that’s a feature.
There will be a period in which there’s a ton of food over there but your little fishy fins can’t get to it, and that sucks, but deal with it yourself, or just chill and let things happen. I promise if it’s important someone will solve it eventually and the scales do not need to be tipped for every little thing like phone app permissiveness.
In the meantime, you are free to not buy an android phone if you don’t like the system that Google has produced. You seem to think that because you can see its insides that it is collectively owned. It isn’t. Google owns it. Talk of talking it from its owners, is theft. In this case, justified entirely because you don’t like a process they decided on.
Don’t make me defend Google, I fucking hate Google.
The phone scammers who are saying the FBI/NSA/IRS will arrest you unless you install sketchy remote access software or other malware are rather convincing to a certain demographic of people and no amount of text on the screen will stop that. It all comes down to whether or not you view the tradeoff being that vulnerable people are worth protecting with this measure worldwide or not.
Hard disagree. My grandma is just going to follow the scammers directions.
A huge number of people just click accept to any popup they get because they're so fed up with seeing them. It's something that is often analysed in design of medical products
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.
I'm pretty convinced it is just Google testing boiling the water steady and slowly :)
It's not 100% perfect, but it helps reduce scams. And with AI, scams are probably going to get more frequent and harder to realize it's a scam.
If you know you want your phone unlocked, just start the process as soon as you get your phone, and then it's yours. It's like an extra day of shipping.
-
Edit: Google explains this more:
In these scenarios, scammers exploit fear – using threats of financial ruin, legal trouble, or harm to a loved one – to create a sense of extreme urgency. They stay on the phone with victims, coaching them to bypass security warnings and disable security settings before the victim has a chance to think or seek help.
According to a 2025 report from the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), 57% of surveyed adults experienced a scam in the past year, resulting in a global consumer loss of $442 billion.
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...
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 [0] or benching without any arch in their back [1]. 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 instead of spending time training Gemini to be a general-assist LLM they could train a very small local model to hyperspecifically guard against known intrusions.
There are so many more pro-social, less-draconian ways of tackling safety issues, from socialization to ongoing support to education efforts. A lockdown that just happens to also help ensure that they can extract their pound of flesh inside the abattoir that is Google Play seems at best overly protective and at worst just more corporate extraction of surplus value from individuals.
[0] https://brookbushinstitute.com/glossary/scapular-plane
[1] https://www.strongerbyscience.com/how-to-bench/#:~:text=it%2...
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.
I strongly agree with this statement.
If a piece of public communication is intended to sway the reader's opinion without informing them (or while selectively informing them, which is close to the same thing), it is propaganda.
I don't. An hour would make the same point and provide the same level of protection. So would clicking through a few screens with very simple and easy to understand warning messages about the risk of scams. Sure, it's a compromise, but it's pretty much the opposite of excellent.
One important way that scams reach end users are through the willing participation of ad platforms, and even before DSA (not that much has changed) people (myself included) have done countless reports of straight up scam ads with no recourse and a templated "we have found nothing wrong with the ad".
As a data point, have you not seen the Tai Chi AI ads on YouTube that will "make you a different person by the end of the week" which where run by a company that sold you a subscription via dark patterns with all the surprises that brings (like a big headache of an unsubscribe process).
Or the fact that Meta knows that X% of it's ads are scam/phising and do nothing about it because it hurts the bottomline (an AI chat will help you with references).
The hypocrisy is too much coming from Google since they are owners of the machine that feed scams right to your doorstep.
And let's not ignore all the other fronts they are fighting on to further lock down the Android platform (such as not making source available immediately and moving more of the runtime in their play services and platform integrity nonsense).
If I have to wait 24h to install an app from another store, I demand the same to apply to AppStore. I see app stores just like browsers: users must have the ability to choose which browser they want when installing an operating system, and for Android, users must be able to select which app store they want and they should work the same way.
The risk of people cutting themselves is not a responsibility nor a concern for the knife manufacturers. I would be very upset if one day all kitchen knives would be sold blunt just to mitigate some clueless people from cutting their fingers off.
Similarly, I seriously and absolutely don't get it why people falling for scams should be a reason to require KYC to distribute apps.
Especially given that KYC-passed accounts are easily obtainable online for pennies.
Maybe before trying to go off half assed exactly like this outrage website does, you should take 5 minutes to be bothered to see if what you are saying is even mildly correct
People gotta learn. Sometimes the best teacher is pain and suffering. I wish that weren’t true, but in my time on this planet, there has never been more truth to “you can lead a horse to water, but you certainly can’t make it drink it.”
Trying to save people against their will just doesn’t seem the best path. I’d rather more effort be put into education on best practices, or investment in an app sniffer that can try and identify common attack vectors. Idk, anything other than “some people are too stupid for their own good, so now we all have less freedom.” I mean truly, if you’re worried about grandma’s phone safety, only let her buy an iPhone. No android for mi-ma.
All I see here is Google snatching at the opportunity to get some of that scrumptious walled garden money.
Apple's is a scam in comparison and must be repaid every year.
Before you @ me, HN, I run GrapheneOS. I fully understand and practice "own your own hardware". Most people probably shouldn't, though, because they lack the technical ability / interest to do so safely, and throwing them to the wolves strikes me as ideology pushed to the point of foolishness.
Now, y'all can flame my ass.
...
30 cents out of every dollar, you say?
NackerHughes•1h ago
Every app and every device, worldwide, with no opt-out.
This includes apps shared between friends, distributed through F-Droid, built by hobbyists for personal use.
Independent developers, church and community groups, and hobbyists alike will all be frozen out of being able to develop and distribute their software.
Registration requires:
- Paying a fee to Google - Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions - Surrendering your government-issued identification - Providing evidence of your private signing key - Listing all current and all future application identifiers
If a developer does not comply, their apps get silently blocked on every Android device worldwide.
electric_mayhem•1h ago
Aozora7•1h ago
nkjoep•47m ago
The issue will be your bank, your gov, your uni, and school not releasing a compatible app for you.
And nowadays a device that cannot communicate or be trusted by other actors of the network (internet) is pretty much useless.
I hope those entities will wake up and start serving equivalents functionalities via the open web.
That is why we have the good old WWW for.
echelon•39m ago
We can use AI to take back the entire tech stack.
Every moat, every walled garden, every infrastructure piece can be rebuilt with AI.
We're seeing it with desktop apps, with games. It will happen to infrastructure and platforms. I'm itching at the opportunity to build open cloud primitives and P2P social protocols.
We don't need big tech anymore. We just need to be able to run our models.
electric_mayhem•19m ago
Who is Ford to tell me I can’t have a widget for each of my ford EVs visible at the same time? Or even that the single-car widget thry do allow has has to be four times bigger than I want it to be, and waste screen real estate on dead space and things that I don’t want?
cheesemonk66•38m ago
other8026•35m ago
glorth•27m ago
Honestly at this point, I'm just gonna start transitioning to Ubuntu Touch. The Android experiment has run its course.
rjh29•1h ago
As it runs through Google Play Services, it's pretty likely they'll boil the frog and make it even harder in the future. Moving to an open platform is a good idea.
roosterIllusi0n•18m ago
jhowards•14m ago
barelysapient•14m ago
Vaushite•12m ago
Volundr•8m ago
StableAlkyne
KMnO4•33m ago
Obviously this does not affect “every device worldwide”. I don’t have a single Android phone, and the devices I own that do run Android are not affected.
Eddy_Viscosity2•17m ago
small_model•18m ago
Georgelemental•15m ago
fishgoesblub•14m ago
user43928•13m ago
Despite Google's best efforts to automatically ban malicious developers, catching many legitimate developers in the crossfire, their store isn't exactly a bastion of quality or scam-free.
vlyan•6m ago
I'm sure you will not object when that happens. you are not a murderer or rapist, are you?
ChrisRR•8m ago
dylan604•2m ago
I don't understand your use of surrendering here. In normal usage, that means handing over your identification to authorities so that you are no longer in possession of the physical ID. Typically, one hears this being done to people that have been arrested as condition of their release on bail so they cannot flee the country.
Google is not asking you to give them your physical identification for them to hold while you are being a developer. They are asking for a copy of your ID as so many other companies do. You have to provide an ID to check into a hotel, not surrender your ID. You have to provide an ID to interact with a bank (for those that still do that in person), and again they give it back. Apps like Uber/Lyft/AirBnB/etc also ask for images of IDs as well.
Why you would choose to say surrender like this just shows how you're willing to use words to make things sound worse in order to persuade people to your point. However, you have now ceded the high road and just become another one of those mountain out of mole hills types. Was your argument so weak that you have to go to this level of twisting the narrative?