(keepandroidopen.org)
In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
> For example, a common attack we track in Southeast Asia illustrates this threat clearly. A scammer calls a victim claiming their bank account is compromised and uses fear and urgency to direct them to sideload a "verification app" to secure their funds, often coaching them to ignore standard security warnings. Once installed, this app — actually malware — intercepts the victim's notifications. When the user logs into their real banking app, the malware captures their two-factor authentication codes, giving the scammer everything they need to drain the account.
> While we have advanced safeguards and protections to detect and take down bad apps, without verification, bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly. It becomes an endless game of whack-a-mole. Verification changes the math by forcing them to use a real identity to distribute malware, making attacks significantly harder and more costly to scale.
I agree that mandatory developer registration feels too heavy handed, but I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."
A related approach might be mandatory developer registration for certain extremely sensitive permissions, like intercepting notifications/SMSes...? Or requiring an expensive "extended validation" certificate for developers who choose not to register...?
Why would the community give a different response? Everything is fine as it is. Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom. That is a fundamental truth of the world. At some point you need to treat people as adults, which includes letting them make very bad decisions if they insist on doing so.
Someone being gullible and willing to do things that a scammer tells them to do over the phone is not an "attack vector". It is people making a bad decision with their freedom. And that is not sufficient reason to disallow installing applications on the devices they own, any more than it would be acceptable for a bank to tell an alcoholic "we aren't going to let you withdraw your money because we know you're just spending it at the liquor store".
Taking a step back though, I suspect there are cultural differences in approach here. Growing up in Europe, the idea of a regulation to make everyone safer is perfectly acceptable to me, whereas I get the impression that many folks who grew up in the US would feel differently. That's fine! But we also have to recognise these differences and recognise that the platforms in question here are global platforms with global impact and reach.
It is not enough to write "be careful" on a bag you get from a pharmacy... certain medications require you to both have a prescription, and also to have a conversation with a pharmacist because of how dangerous the decisions the consumer makes can be.
Normal human beings can be very dumb. It's entirely reasonable to expect society to try to protect them at some level.
There are alternative solutions if the true goal is maintaining user freedom while protecting dumb users. But that is not the true goal of the upcoming changes.
But I'm afraid that this is security theater and the true goal is to protect revenues by making it hard or impossible to install apps that impact Alfabet bottom line (eg third party YouTube clients.)
It solves the 'smartest bear / dumbest human' overlap design concern in this situation.
relatively easy for devs, but hard to scale for scammers
And it seems Google thinks society is beginning to unravel in SEA due to scammers. Trust breaks down, people stop using phones to do important things, GDP can shrink, banks go back to cheques, trees will be cut down!!
It's bad to let people go and catch the zombie virus and the come back and spread it, right?
...
I don't like it, but the obvious decision is to set up a parallel authority that can issue certificates to developers (for side loading), so we don't have to trust Google. Let the developer community manage this. And if we can't then Google can revoke the intermediary CA. And of course Google and other manufacturers could sell development devices that are unlocked, etc.
It signals that you don't care much about security, and that you don't care about non-technical users, and don't even have the capacity to see how they view a system.
Sure, you can analyze domain names effectively, you can distinguish between an organic post and an ad, you know the difference between Read and Write permissions to system files, etc...
But can you put yourself on the shoes of a user that doesn't? If not, you are rightfully not in a position as a steward of such users, and Google is.
Education is also not that effective. Spreading warnings about scams is hard and warnings don't reach many people for a whole laundry list of reasons.
The status quo is decidedly not fine. Society must act to protect those that can't protect themselves. The only remaining question is the how.
Google has an approach that would work, but at a high cost. Is there an alternative change that has the same effects on scammers, but with fewer issues for other scenarios?
Education isn't really working at this global scale. It doesn't reach people the way you seem to belive it does. Many, if not most people are generally disinterested in learning new things and this gets amplified when it involves technology.
Nope. We could, for example, ask developers to register with their legal identity to release apps.
Play store can be fast and verification based and the F/OSS stores can be slower, reputation and review based.
...
But fundamentally the easiest thing is to ask people to pay to unlock the phone's security barriers, this makes it harder and costlier for scammers.
So... no food and safety regulations, because life is not safe, and people should have the freedom to poison food with cheaper, lethal ingredients because their freedom matters more?
You're right that things can't be made more safe without taking away the freedom to harm people. Which is why even the most freedom-loving countries on earth strike a balance. They actually have tons and tons of safety regulations that save tons and tons of lives, even you from your point of view that means not "treating people as adults". You have to wear a seatbelt, even if you feel like you're not being treated like an adult. Because it's also not just your own life you're putting at risk, but your passengers' as well.
You're taking the most extreme libertarian stance possible. Thank goodness that's an extremely minority view, and that the vast, vast majority of voters do actually think safety is important.
If they make FOSS illegal, guess I’ll be a criminal. Come and take it.
Food and seatbelts, that's literal health and life-and-death; very immediate and visible.
"Cybersecurity" rarely is; and even when it is, the problem is that the centralized established authorities (like google) aren't at all provably good at this.
> So... no food and safety regulations, because life is not safe, and people should have the freedom to poison food with cheaper, lethal ingredients because their freedom matters more?
This is harm to others and is very obviously something we should enforce. There are unreasonable laws about food (banning the sale of raw milk cheese for example, which most of the world enjoys with perfect safety), but by and large they are unobjectionable.
> You're right that things can't be made more safe without taking away the freedom to harm people. Which is why even the most freedom-loving countries on earth strike a balance.
I never said I was opposed to striking a balance. Of course we can strike a balance. Indeed we already have when it comes to installing apps on Android. But these measures are being advanced as if safety were the only consideration, which it isn't.
> You're taking the most extreme libertarian stance possible.
No, that is what you have projected onto me. That's not actually what my stance is.
That's right, it's your decision to use Android. If you choose to do so, that's on you.
This is about like the geeks who hate the idea of ad supported services and think that everyone should just pay for every service they use.
FWIW: I do exclusively buy Apple devices, pay for streaming services ad free tier, the Stratechery podcast bundle, ATP and the Downstream podcasts and Slate. I also pay for ChatGPT and refuse to use any ad supported app or game.
The world does not consist of all rational actors, and this opens the door to all kinds of exploitation. The attacks today are very sophisticated, and I don't trust my 80-yr old dad to be able to detect them, nor many of my non-tech-savvy friends.
> any more than it would be acceptable for a bank to tell an alcoholic "we aren't going to let you withdraw your money because we know you're just spending it at the liquor store".
This is a false equivalence.
>There is a default restriction which is good enough for most cases, but the user has the ability to open things up further if he needs.
But this is what the other guy's point is. You are defining "good enough for most cases" in a way that he is not, then making the argument that what he says is equivalent to not allowing an alcoholic to buy beer. Why can you set what level is an acceptable amount of restriction, but he can't?
That is where we differ. It is, ultimately, the victim of a scam who makes the choice of "yes, this person is trustworthy and I will do what they say". The only way to prevent that is to block the user from having the power to make that decision, which is to say protecting them from themselves.
But for regular people, that is not really the world they want. If the bank app wrongly shows they’re paying a legitimate payee, such as the bank, themselves or the tax authority, people politically want the bank to reimburse.
Then the question becomes not if the user trusts the phone’s software, but if the bank trusts the software on the user’s phone. Should the bank not be able to trust the environment that can approve transfers, then the bank would be in the right to no longer offer such transfers.
If random malware the user chose to install does that, then that is not the bank's fault. The bank is no more involved than anybody else. And no, I don't think "regular people" want to make that the bank's fault.
For securities, if I own stock outright, the company has to indemnify if they do a transfer for somebody else or if I lack legal capacity. So transfer agents require Medallion Signature Guarantees from a bank or broker. MSGs thereby require a lengthy banking relationship and probably showing up in person.
For broker to broker transfers, there is ACATS. The receiving broker is in fact liable in a strict, no-fault way.
As far as I know, these liabilities are never waived. Basically for the sizable transfers, there is relatively little faith in the user’s computers (including phones). To the extent there is faith, it has total liability on some capitalized party for fraud.
These defaults are probably unknown for most people, even those with large amounts of securities. The system is expected to work since it has been set up this way.
Clearly a large number of programmers have a bent to go the complete opposite direction from MSGs, where everything is private keys or caveat emptor no matter the technical sophistication of the customer. I, well, disagree with that sentiment. The regime where it’s possible for no capitalized entity to be liable for wrongful transfers (defined as when the customer believes they are transferring to a different human-readable payee than actually receiving funds) should not be the default.
Are banks POWERFUL? Do they have lots of money and/or connections to those who do? Do they have a vested interest in getting transactions right?
Absolutely!
Now, with all that money and power -- they -- whoever THEY are, need to come up with smart ways to verify transactions that don't involve me giving them all the keys to all my devices.
We have protections like this elsewhere - even when they have some "ownership." The bank kinda owns my house, but they still can't come in whenever they want.
This is more or less how people expect things to work today ....
The money mule themselves is almost certainly insolvent to pay the damages. Currencies can also change by the money mule (either to a different fiat currency or crypto), putting the ultimate link completely out of reach of the originating country.
If intermediary banks are deputized and become liable in a no-fault sense, then legitimate transfers out become very difficult. How does a bank prove a negative for where the funds come from? De-banking has already been a problem for a process-based AML regime.
For example, the "Restricted Settings"¹ feature (introduced in Android 13 and expanded in Android 14) addresses the specific scam technique of coaching someone over the phone to allow the installation of a downloaded APK. "Enhanced Confirmation Mode"², introduced in Android 15, adds furthers protection against potentially malicious apps modifying system settings. These were all designed and rolled out with specified threat models in mind, and all evidence points to them working fairly well.
For Google to suddenly abandon these iterative security improvements and unilaterally decide to lock-down Android wholesale is a jarring disconnect from their work to date. Malware has always been with us, and always will be: both inside the Play Store and outside it. Google has presented no evidence to indicate that something has suddenly changed to justify this extreme measure. That's what we mean by "Existing Measures Are Sufficient".
[^1]: https://support.google.com/android/answer/12623953
[^2]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/prebuilts/fullsdk/...
"Existing measures are working," perhaps?
Many Android phones still do not have a separate secure element.
Also, the Play Store itself regularly contains malware.
In the end it is mostly about control, dressed up as protecting users. If it was about security, Google would support GrapheneOS remote attestation for Google Pay (for being the most secure Android variant) and cut off many existing phones with deplorable security.
In other news, a new study shows that cutting off your feet is 100% effective against athlete's foot.
What is this evidence? Please share it.
In the section "Existing Measures Are Sufficient." your letter also mentions
> Developer signing certificates that establish software provenance
without any explanation of how that would be the case. With the current system, yes, every app has to be signed. But that's it. There's no certificate chain required, no CA-checks are performed and self-signed certificates are accepted without issue. How is that supposed to establish any form of provenance?
If you really think there is a better solution to this, I would suggest you propose some viable alternative. So far all I've heard for the opponents of this change is, either "everything is fine" or "this is not the way", while conveniently ignoring the fact that there is an actual problem that needs a solution.
That said, I do generally agree, with you that mandatory verification for *all* apps would be overkill. But that is not what Google has announced in their latest blog posts. Yes, the flow to disable verification and the exemptions for hobbyists and students are just vague promises for now. But the public timeline (https://developer.android.com/developer-verification#timelin...) states developer verification will be generally available in March 2026. Why publish this letter now and not wait a few weeks so we can see what Google actually is planning before getting everybody outraged about it?
The problem lies in (technical) literacy, to some extent people's natural tendency to trust what others are telling them, the incompetence of investigative powers, and the unwillingness of certain countries to shut down scam farms and human trafficking.
My bank's app refuses to operate when I'm on the phone. It also refuses to operate when anything is remotely controlling the phone. There's nothing a banking app can do against vulnerable phones rooted by malware (other than force to operate when phones are too vulnerable according to whatever threshold you decide on so there's nothing to root) but I feel like the countries where banks and police are putting the blame on Google are taking the easy way out.
Scammers will find a way around these restrictions in days and everyone else is left worse off.
When a scammer pretending to be your bank tells you to install an app for verification and it says "This app was created by John Smith" even grandma will get suspicious and ask why it doesn't show the bank's name.
Well, in that case, Google has an easy escalation path that they already use for Google Business Listings: They send you a physical card, in the mail, with a code, to the address listed. If this turns out to be a real problem at scale, the patch is barely an inconvenience.
Now they'll need to pay off a local mailman to give them all of Google's letters with an address in an area they control so they can register a town's worth of addresses, big whoop. It'll cost them a bit more than the registration fee, but I doubt it'll be enough to solve the problem.
Yeah, this is a huge amount more work than, like, nothing.
How? You've now moved the level of sophistication required from "someone runs some bots on the facebook website" to "someone is now committing complex fraud against a government".
If the only people who can run scams are state sponsored, that's still vastly better than the status quo.
> Amazon has a huge problem with packages being sent to fake people at different addresses.
This usually involves those people getting weird packages and not doing anything with them, it doesn't require attacker-controlled addresses.
In contrast, convincing someone to read an OTP over the phone is a one-time manual bypass. To use your logic..
A insalled app - Like a hidden camera in a room.
Social engineering over phone - Like convincing someone to leave the door unlocked once.
The motivating example as described involves "giving the scammer everything they need to drain the account". Once they've drained the account, they don't need ongoing access.
A root cause solution is proper sandboxing. Google and apple will not do this, because they rely on applications have far too much access to make their money.
One of the fundamentals of security is that applications should use the minimum data and access they need to operate. Apple and Google break this with every piece of software they make. The disease is spreading from the inside out. Putting a shitty lotion on top won't fix this.
Wow, that a major claim. What apps are malware, exactly?
>This is still not a root cause solution, it's just a mitigation.
Requiring signed apps solves the issue though, as it provides identification of whoever is running the scam and a method for remuneration or prosecution.
I don't understand how this is a major claim at all, it should be obvious. All repositories of large enough sizes contain malware because malware doesn't declare itself as malware.
This is exacerbated by the fact the Google Play Store and Apple App Store allow closed-source applications. It's much easier to validate behavior on things like the Debian repos, where maintainers can, and do, audit the source code.
Google does not have a magic "is this malware" algorithm, that doesn't exist. They rely on heuristics and things like asking the authors "hey is this malware". As you can imagine, this isn't very effective. They don't even install and test the apps fully. Not that it matters much, obviously malware can easily change it's behavior to not be detectable from the end-user just running the app.
> Requiring signed apps solves the issue though, as it provides identification of whoever is running the scam and a method for remuneration or prosecution.
It doesn't, for three reasons:
1. Identifying an app doesn't magically make it not malware. I can tell you "hey I made this app" and you still have zero idea if it's malware. This is still a post mitigation. Meaning, if we somehow know an app is malware, we can find out who wrote it. It doesn't do the "is this malware" part of the mitigation, which is the most important part.
2. Bad actors typically have little allegiance to ethics, meaning they typically will not be honest about their identity. There are criminal organizations which operate in meatspace and fake their identities, which is 1000x harder than doing it online. Most malware will not have a legitimate identity tacked to it.
3. Bad actors typically come from countries which don't prosecute them as hard. So, even if you find out if something is malware, and then find out the actual people behind it, you typically can't prosecute them. Even large online services like the Silk Road lasted for a long time, and most likely still do exist, even despite the literal US federal government trying to stop them.
Why would an app silently intercepts SMS/MMS data ? Why does an app needs network access ?
Running untrusted code in your browser is also "a persistent technical compromise" but nobody seems to care.
The sideloading warning is much much milder, something like "are you sure you want to install this?".
A fundamental difference with e.g. FIDO2 (especially hardware-backed) is that the private credentials are keyed to the relying party ID, so it's not possible for a phising site to intercept the challenge-response.
> Please enter the code we sent you in the app.
lol, lmao even
Passkeys are also an active area to defeat phishing as long as the device is not compromised. To the extent there is attestation, passkeys also create very critical posts about locking down devices.
Given what I see in scams, I think too much is put on the user as it is. The anti-phishing training and such try to blame somebody downward in the hierarchy instead of fixing the systems. For example, spear-phishing scams of home down payments or business accounts work through banks in the US not tying account numbers to payee identity. The real issue is that the US payment system is utterly backward without confirmation of payee (I.e. giving the human readable actual name of recipient account in the banking app). For wire transfers or ACH Credit in the US, commercial customers are basically expected to play detective to make sure new account numbers are legit.
As I understand it, sideloading apps can overcome that payee legal name display in other countries. So the question for both sideloading and passkeys is if we want banks liable for correctly showing the actual payee for such transfers. To the extent they are liable, they will need to trust the app’s environment and the passkey.
Because I hope you realize that clamping down on “sideloading” (read: installing unsigned software) on PCs is the next logical step. TPMs are already present on a large chunk of consumer PCs - they just need to be used.
They are saying that claiming the underlying problem is not real or not big enough to need addressing is an ineffective way to argue.
Would it make sense to then argue that enforcing TPM-backed measured boot and binary signature verification is a legitimate way to address the problem?
Are we saying that, because scamming exists and we haven’t proposed an alternative, it means that clamping down on software installation methods is a legitimate solution to the problem?
That’s enough for me to distribute a few freedom devices to friends and neighbors, and still have extras to account for normal failures.
I also hoard source code, and will happily distribute that with the computers! Maybe that’s “programmer brained,” if so then fine by me!
Also every user is free to simply not use the option of installing things outside of the store.
Do you know anyone who works in a professional creative field that doesn't involve writing code? If so, ask them how they'd feel about their work bring out there on the internet free to all takers. What the implications would be for their ability to feed their children and pay their mortgage doing the things they love.
This is what I mean by "programmer-brained." Of all creative workers, only programmers seem okay with abolishing IP laws, I guess because they figure they'll be okay living out of an office at MIT, or even worse out of an office at some YC startup that turns the user into the product. But artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, etc. all put food on the table because of those IP laws programmers hate so much. Taking that protection for the fruit of your labor away would be at least as disruptive as AI has been.
No, no, a thousand times no. This is an argument for authoritarian clampdown on general computing and must be opposed by all means necessary. I have the right to run whatever code I wish on my own damn property without the permission of arbitrary authorities or whatever subset of society you favor, and if you or they have a problem with this, you or they can proceed to pound sand.
It’s a good time to buy a pallet of old SFF computers, just in case.
People fearful about being scammed should buy a phone with a hardware lock to prevent it from ever accepting sideloads--no option to go to dev mode, ever. You could even charge more for the extra security.
People who want the freedom to sideload can choose to buy a phone without the extra hardware security feature.
OK, so instead of educating stupid (or overly naive) people, we implement "protections" to limit any and all people to do useful things with their devices? And as a "side effect" force them to use "our" app store only? Something doesn't smell that good here …
How about a less drastic measure, like imposing a serious delay for "side loading" … let's say I'd to tell my phone that I want to install F-Droid and then would have to wait for some hours before the installation is possible? While using the device as usual, of course.
The count down could be combined with optional tutorials to teach people to contact their bank by phone meanwhile. Or whatever small printed tips might appear suitable.
You can go a softer route of requiring some complicated mechanism of "unlocking" your phone before you can install unverified apps - but by definition that mechanism needs to be more complicated then even a guided (by a scammer) normal non-technical user can manage. So you've essentially made it impossible for normies to install non-playstore apps and thus also made all other app stores irrelevant for the most part.
The scamming issue is real, but the proposed solutions seem worse then the disease, at least to me.
This is also true if they can only install verified apps, because no company on earth has the resources to have an actually functional verification process and stuff gets through every day.
This is true, but if this goes through, I imagine that the next step for safety fascists will be to require developer licensing and insurance like general contractors have. And after that, expensive audits, etc, until independent developers are shut out completely.
The next step is simply that the scammer modifies the official bank app, adds a backdoor to it, and convinces the victim to install that app and login with it. No hardware-bound credentials are going to help you with that, the only fix is attestation, which brings you back to the aformentioned issue of blessed apps.
The backdoored version of the app would need to have a different app ID, since the attacker does not have the legitimate publisher's signing keys. So the OS shouldn't let it access the legitimate app's credentials.
A simple scenario adapted from the one given in the android blog post: the attacker calls the victim and convinces them that their banking account is compromised, and they need to act now to secure it. The scammer tells the victim, that their account got compromised because they're using and outdated version of the banking app that's no longer suppported. He then walks them through "updating" their app, effectively going through the "new device" workflow - except the new device is the same as the old one, just with the backdoored app.
You can prevent this with attestation of course, essentially giving the bank's backend the ability to verify that the credentials are actually tied to their app, and not some backdoored version. But now you have a "blessed" key that's in the hands of Google or Apple or whomever, and everyone who wants to run other operating systems or even just patched versions of official apps is out of luck.
This is where the scheme breaks down: the new passkey credential can never be associated with the legitimate RP. The attacker will not be able to use the credential to sign in to the legitimate app/site and steal money.
The attacker controls the fake/backdoored app, but they do not control the signing key which is ultimately used to associate app <-> domain <-> passkey, and they do not control the system credentials service which checks this association. You don't even need attestation to prevent this scenario.
You're assuming the attacker must go through the credential manager and the backing hardware, but that is only the case with attestation. Without it, the attacker can simply generate their own passkey in software, because the backend on the banks side would have no way of telling where the passkey came from.
That doesn't work, because the scammer's app will be signed with a different key, so the relying party ID is different and the secure element (or whatever hardware backing you use), refuses to do the challenge-response.
The spoofed app can't request passkeys for the legit app because the legit app's domain is associated with the legit app's signing key fingerprint via .well-known/assetlinks.json, and the CredentialManager service checks that association.
No need for locking down the app ecosystem, no need to verify developers. Just don't use phishable credentials and you are not vulnerable to malware trying to phish credentials.
0: https://www.bankofamerica.com/.well-known/assetlinks.json
Alternatively reading notifications could be opt in per app, so the reading app needs to have permission to read your SMS message app notifications, or your bank notifications, that would not be as full proof as that requires some tech literacy to understand.
You can also cut yourself with a kitchen knife but nobody proposes banning kitchen knives. Google and the state are not your nannies.
oh nice, i love this game.
you cant carry a kitchen knife that is too long, you cant carry your kitchen knife into a school, you cant brandish your kitchen knife at police, you cant let a small child run around with a kitchen knife...
literally most of what "the state" does is be a "nanny"
(not agreeing or disagreeing with google here, i have no horse in this particular race. but this little knife quip is silly when you think about it for more than 5 seconds)
the point of my comment was that the state does implement a lot of rules (read: "is a nanny"), despite the claim otherwise.
What?
although, i would imagine at some length, it becomes a "sword" (even if marketed as a knife) and falls under some other "nanny"-ing. i have not googled that.
So, having been given the proverbial inch (or centimeter), those obsessed with banning potentially-dangerous tools are trying to take the next mile (or kilometer): https://theconversation.com/why-stopping-knife-crime-needs-t...
I think my overriding concern is not nuking F-Droid. I actually think that's a great solution and, interestingly, F-Droid apps already don't use significant permissions (or often use any permissions!) so that might work. Also it would be good if perhaps F-Droid itself could earn a trusted distributor status if there's a way to do that.
Or a marriage of the two, F-Droid can jump through some hoops to be a trusted distributor of apps that don't use certain critical permissions.
I think there have to be ways of creatively addressing the issue that don't involve nuking a non-evil app distribution option.
This reeks of "think of the children^Wscammed". I mean, following this principle the only solution is to completely remove any form of sideloading and have just one single Google approved store because security.
> A related approach might be mandatory developer registration for certain extremely sensitive permissions, like intercepting notifications/SMSes...? O
It doesn't work like that. What they mean with "mandatory developer registration" is what Google already does if you want to start as a developer in Play Store. Pay 25$ one-time fee with a credit card and upload your passport copy to some (3rd-party?) ID verification service. [1] In contrast with F-Droid where you just need a GitLab user to open a merge request in the fdroid-data repository and submit your app, which they scan for malware and compile from source in their build server.
[1] but I guess there are plenty of ways to fool Google anyway even with that, if you are a real scammer.
So yes, "its fine the way it is" _is_ valid; but the meaning it "we're at a good point in the balance, any more cost is too much given the gains it generates"
People choosing between the smartphone ecosystems already have a choice between the safety of a walled garden and the freedom to do anything you like, including shooting yourself in the foot.
You don't spend a decade driving other "user freedom" focused ecosystems out of the marketplace, only to yank those supposed freedoms away from the userbase that intentionally chose freedom over safety.
"I am responsible for my own actions" mode.
You click that, the phone switches into a separate user space. Securenet is disabled, which is what most financial apps rely on.
Then you can install all the fun stuff you want.
This is really a matter of Google not sandboxing stuff right. Why the hell does App A need access to data or notifications from App B.
Advertising networks. Just like how you see crap like a metronome app have a laundry list of permissions that it doesn’t need. Some cases they are just scammy data harvesters, but in other cases it’s the ad networks that are actually demanding those permissions.
Google won’t sandbox properly because it’s against their direct business interest for them to do so. Google’s Android is adware, and that is the fundamental problem.
Aren't we supposed to have sandboxing to prevent this kind of thing? If the malware relies on exploiting n-days on unpatched OSes, they could bypass the sideloading restrictions too.
On the Play store there is a bunch of annoying checking for apps that request READ_SMS to prevent this very thing. Off Play such defense is impossible.
Only immutable devices should be allowed as second factor.
Manually installing an app might be close to the limit of what grandma can be coached through by an impatient scammer.
Multiple steps over adb, challenges that can't be copy and pasted in a script, etc. It can be done but it won't provide as much control over end user devices.
There is a point at which people have to think critically about what they are doing. We, as a society, should do our best to protect the vulnerable (elderly, mentally disabled, etc) but we must draw the line somewhere.
It’s the same thing in the outside world too - otherwise we could make compelling arguments about removing the right to drive cars, for example, due to all the traffic accidents (instead we add measures like seatbelts as a compromise, knowing it will never totally solve the issue).
If you can be convinced by this, you can be convinced by anything. What if the scammer uses "fear and urgency" to make the person log onto their bank account and transfer the funds to the scammer?
If you can convince people to install new apps through "fear and urgency," especially with how annoying it often is to do outside of the blessed google-owned flow (and they're free to make it more annoying without taking this step), that person can be convinced of anything.
> I agree that mandatory developer registration feels too heavy handed, but I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."
There's no other "solution" other than control by an authority that you totally trust if your "threat" is that a user will be able to install arbitrary apps.
The manufacturer, service provider, and google, of course, won't be held to any standard or regulations; they just get trusted because they own your device and its OS and you're already getting covertly screwed and surveilled by them. Google is a scammer constantly trying to exfiltrate information from my phone and my life in order to make money. The funny thing is that they are only pretending to defend me from their competition - they're not threatened by those small-timers - they're actually "defending" me from apps that I can use to replace their own backdoors. Their threat is that they might not know my location at all times, or all of my contacts, or be able to tax anyone who wants access to me.
Right now when I search for "ChatGPT", the top app is a counterfeit app with a fake logo, is it really this store which is supposed to help us fight scams?
Just did Play search for "ChatGPT" and the top-2 results were for OpenAI's app (one result was sponsored by OpenAI one result was from Google's search). So anecdotally your results may vary.
Permissions are a great way to distinguish.
Or would you be OK knowing that Thunderbird you downloaded from https://thunderbird.net/ is signed by the thunderbird.net certificate owner?
The permissions approach isn't bad. I may trust Thunderbird for some things, but permission to read SMS and notifications is permission to bypass SMS 2FA for every other account using that phone number. It deserves a special gate that's very hard for a scammer to pass. The exact nature of the gate can be reasonably debated.
Make the warning a full screen overlay with a button to call local police then.
(Seriously)
"but local police won't treat that seriously..." "the victim will be coached to ignore even that..." well no shit then you have a bigger problem which isn't for google to fix.
The community does not need to do that. Installing software on my device should not require identification to be uploaded to a third party beforehand.
We're getting into dystopian levels of compliance here because grandma and grandpa are incapable of detecting a scam. I sympathize, not everyone is in their peak mental state at all times, but this seems like a problem for the bank to solve, not Android.
Just like they went after Samsung for adding friction to the sideload workflow to warn people against scams.
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/30/epic-games-sues-samsung...
It would not be unsurprising for a government to tell Google they must block any VPN apps from being installed on devices, and Google using the developer requirements to carry out the ban.
Don't they already have that power?
How can you judge if Google's plan is a good one? Add up the harms caused by the new rules and weigh that against the reduction in harm and see where the balance is?
I have a hard time believing the net outcome for the overall Android community would be negative.
Google listened.
Blame the judge for one of the worst legal calls in recent history. Google is a monopoly and Apple is not. Simple fix for Google...
Same comment I made a few days ago, I feel it bears repeating as much as possible until it's really driven home how detrimental and uninformed that decision was.
Things that everyone relies on for life are generally regulated by law. Telecom platforms for instance. I’d say the mandatory software platform I need for my bank, drivers license, daily communication, etc should be in this bucket.
The EU declaring both Apple and Google gateway platforms is a much better approach. Congress is abdicating its responsibility to craft the legal frameworks for equal access in the modern age.
The US government is by design supposed to be as minimal as possible, and the laws affecting you kept as local as possible. We're not supposed to have a "the government" that's the same as EU governments. "The federal government should make laws" should be an absolute last resort. When you say "congress is abdicating its responsibility", I'd like you to point to where in the constitution it says that congress has such responsibilities.
Apple was deemed not to be anticompetitive in app stores because there was no existing market of app stores on iOS. Google was more open in allowing other app stores, but deemed anticompetitive by discouraging their use relative to the Play store.
The irony is the more open player was deemed more anticompetitive. OP is saying Google is “fixing” their anticompetitive behavior by eliminating alternative app stores entirely.
However, there is a relevant court case here. The one about Samsung's "Auto Blocker" (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/samsung-and-epic-gam...). Epic Games sued because Samsung made it too hard to install apps from "untrusted" sources. This may be a reason why Google is now trying to make the process more difficult on the developer side instead.
This conflates identity verification with criminal deterrence, they're not the same thing.
I don't know if this trade off is worth it, but the idea that it won't affect this abuse at all is false.
> Disproportionate impact on marginalized communities and controversial but legal applications
applies more to the elderly in third-world countries who are constantly scammed through fraudulent side-loaded apps than it does to hackers who want to install whatever software they want but do not want to use a non-Google AOSP distribution.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
> Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. [0]
> Advanced users will be able to"Install without verifying," but expect a high-friction flow designed to help users understand the risks. [1]
Firstly - I am yet to see "ongoing conversations with the community" from Google. Either before this blog post or in the substantial time since this blog post. "The community" has no insight into whether any such "advanced flow" is fit for purpose.
Secondly - I as an experienced engineer may be able to work around a "high-friction flow". But I am not fighting this fight for me, I am fighting it for the billions of humans for whom smart phones are an integral part of their daily lives. They deserve the right to be able to install software using free, open, transparent app stores that don't require signing up with Google/Samsung/Amazon for the privilege of: Installing software on a device they own.
One example of a "high friction flow" which I would find unacceptable if implemented for app installation on Android is the way in which browsers treat invalid SSL certificates. If I as a web developer setup a valid cert, and then the client receives an invalid cert, this means that the browser (which is - typically - working on behalf of the customer) is unable to guarantee that it is talking to the right server. This is a specific and real threat model which the browser addresses by showing [2]:
* "Your connection is not private"
* "Attackers might be trying to steal your information (for example, passwords, messages or credit cards)"
* "Advanced" button (not "Back to safety")
* "Proceed (unsafe)" link
* "Not secure" shown in address bar forever
In this threat model, the web dev asked the browser to ensure communication is encrypted, and it is encrypted with their private key. The browser cannot confirm this to be the case, so there is a risk that a MITM attack is taking place.
This is proportionate to the threat, and very "high friction". I don't know of many non-tech people who will click through these warnings.
When the developer uses HSTS, it is even more "high friction". The user is presented all the warnings above, but no advanced button. Instead, on Chromium based browsers they need to type "thisisunsafe" - not into a text box, just randomly type it while viewing the page. On Firefox, there is no recourse. I know of very few software engineers who know how to bypass HSTS certificate issues when presented with them, e.g. in a non-prod environment with corporate certs where they still want to bypass it to test something.
If these "high friction" flows were applied to certified Android devices each time a user wanted to install an app from F-Droid - it would kill F-Droid and similar projects for almost all non-tech users. All users, not just tech users, deserve the right to install software on their smart phone without having to sign up for an "app store" experience that games your attention and tries to get you to install scammy attention seeking games that harvest your personal information and flood you with advertisements
Hence, I don't want to tell people "Just install [insert non-certified AOSP based project here]". I want Android to remain a viable alternative for billions of people.
[0] - https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
[1] - https://x.com/matt_w_forsythe/status/2012293577854930948
One thing, we the people can do, is pressure our politicians to break up Google along with the rest of big tech.
There are many primary challengers this cycle that are running anti-monopoly platforms. Help their cause, signing pointless petitions is just West Wing style fantasy that is extremely childish.
Google will not change their minds, they're too busy buying goodwill from governments by playing along. There aren't any real alternatives to Android that are less closed off and they know it.
It feels like independent development on devices has slowed in recent years. More stores appealing to different developer models/tools and monetization strategies please.
In the time it took you to read this comment, 200 phones were sold.
I've mostly owned Android devices but for my family I've always recommended iOS devices because they are more locked down.
Do BOTH, when possible.
I'm kind of hoping Qualcomm's open sourcing work will also affect the ability to run mainline Linux on Android devices, but it's looking like a Linux OS that covers the bare basics seems to be a decade away.
I'm sorry but people that think this way tend to also think having money is some morality signal and not one of a massive personality defect (greed).
Linux based phones are starting to become viable as daily drivers. [0] They are even coming with VM Android in case an application is needed that does not have a Linux equivalent.
I am interested in how Google's gatekeeper tactics are going to affect Android like platforms such as /e/os and GrapheneOS. [1]
> No luck needed. Linux based phones are starting to become viable as daily drivers.
Then please tell me, which non-Android Linux-based phone can I buy here in Brazil (one of the first places where Android would have these new restrictions)? I'd love to know (not sarcasm, I'm being sincere). Keep in mind that only phones with ANATEL certification can be imported, non-certified phones will be stopped by customs and sent back.
Edit: apparently if it isn’t a “marketable product” then the law may not apply. So far they haven’t enforced it against Linux distros, likely because of this exception. However, IANAL (and definitely not a Brazilian lawyer).
Also, I’m going to coin a new term for the recurring names that I see promoting this kind of thing here: “safety fascists.” Safety fascists won’t sleep until there is a camera watching every home, a government bug in every phone, a 24/7 minder for every citizen. For your safety, of course.
I think I may hate safety fascists more than I hate garden variety fascists. That’s an accomplishment!
Let's consider that Google's Android was and is a huge improvement in security in terms of OS design (even if inspired by iOS) over the previous incumbent (let's call Windows that). That difference in security still exists today (probably due to Window's Backwards Compatibility prioritization, and its later positioning in the market as a cheap powertool (cheap compared to iOS, powertool compared to android).
That security advantage, by the way, was not just the result of initial design, but it required a lot of maintenance, in the form of the 'Play Store' App Store equivalent (at no cost to the user no less).
All this to say that let's consider this context, and consider what alternatives are proposed.
1- The windows 'install whatever you want model' (Now with OS approved certificates): As mentioned, worse, with almost no sandboxing. 2- Linux package managers + install whatever you want: Valid model for powerusers and programmers, not really relevant for massive personal computing. 3- Keeping the old Android system: This would imply simply ignoring the problem of growing professional and untouchable malicious actors that seem to be growing in power with the advent of anonymous financial tech. Is this the actual proposal? Do nothing about the problem? Pretend there is no problem? I don't think the problem is necessarily malware, but to take a specific example, suppose a Casino from Isle of Man is allowing underaged and users from jurisdictions where it is illegal. Regardless of whether you think this is ok, or debatable or it depends on the circumstances. Isn't the ask to identify the developer rather trivial? Just a little bit of paperwork, you want to be a developer? Install code that someone else will use? Put your name in it, have skin in the game.
I think there's also a contradiction between the need for developer privacy and user privacy. Most HN users are privacy-sensitive. Well I propose there's a tradeoff between the privacy of the consumer and the producer. In order to provide privacy and rights to the user, the producer needs to come forward. There's no way to have the cake and eat it too, if both producer and consumer are shy, they will never find each other, if both producer and consumer stay anonymous, they won't trust each other, if both producer and consumer stay anonymous, they don't give any guarantees to the other party that they won't go rogue.
You know this if you've tried to start a business, you can either put your face, your name, register with the state, put your actual address. Or you can use an anonymous brand, a Registered Agent Address, etc... The latter is a harder sell than the former, and you only don't notice it if you are completely absorbed in your own world and cannot put yourself in the shoes of your customer.
tl;dr: Google has an impeccable data security track record. And User/Developer privacy is a tradeoff. Google is right to protect user privacy and not developer privacy.
Concretely, my original plan was to provide an .apk for manual installation first and tackle all this app store madness later. I already have enough on my plate dealing with macOS, Windows, and Linux distribution. With the change, delaying this is no longer viable, so Android is not only one among five platforms with their own requirements, signing, uploading, rules, reviews, and what not, it is one more platform I need to deal with right from the start because users expect software to be multiplatform nowadays.
Quite frankly, it appears to me as if dealing with app stores and arbitrary and ever changing corporate requirements takes away more time than developing the actual software, to the detriment of the end users.
It's sad to watch the decline of personal computing.
The result is unwarranted trust from users in stores that are full of scams.
Apple and Google effectively built malware pipelines under the guise of security.
Scammers will use stolen identities or shell companies. They already do this on the Play Store itself. The $25 fee and passport upload haven't prevented the flood of scam apps there.
Meanwhile F-Droid's model (build from source, scan for trackers/malware) actually provides stronger guarantees about what the app does. No identity check needed because the code speaks for itself.
The permission-based approach someone mentioned above makes way more sense. If your app wants to read SMS or intercept notifications, sure, require extra scrutiny. But a simple calculator app or a notes tool? That's just adding friction for no security benefit.
No permission system can work as well as a proper solution (such as banks and governments getting their shit together and investing in basic digital skills for their citizens).
This just trains everyone to blindly click "accept" thus adding zero security while making the UX terrible for people who know what they're doing
I have an APK I would like you to install on your personal phones. No, I won't tell you who I am.
Please let me know when you are comfortable with this.
If you want to make the decision to install Hay Day, the user should be able to know that it is the Hay Day from Supercell or from Sketchy McMalwareson.
99.9% of apps should have no issue with their name being associated with their work. If you genuinely need to use an anonymously published app, you will still be able to do that as a user.
I'm pretty sure the goal of Google's changes is to make it so you can't
If you like to not be able to run whatever software you want on your computer, and the one your family owns, that's your thing.
Its another pretense, like disabling full disk encryption, where people came with these ideas (instead of other options), because its convenient to them to pretend its the right thing.