It isn't adequately explained by incompetence. This is out of the playbook of boiling the frog. Nothing about this is new or unexpected. We have plenty of history about how these things go down. First they make installing device owner chosen software ridiculously laberous. Then they will remove the option altogether.
Google is using scams as an argument for dismantling ownership and restricting the owner of a device from installing software of their own choice on their own device.
Yet they host the very ads that are part of these scams and profit from them. If Google wanted and actually cared about scams they would stop hosting these scam ads en mass.
It clearly is a pretense. This is not about scams and it will not stop with a ridiculous 24h waiting period to enable installing software. They will remove the option altogether.
Oh boy. They don't host these ads, there are plenty of ad providers that happily do though, outside of Google businesses (Meta). Google also isn't one homogenous business, Android people don't have direct access to the ads people.
This is about scams because 99% of all apk installs come not from basement power users installing cracked apps, but from the older people that are all too trusting to the internet that they're browsing.
I can also tell you from experience that malware Google search ads are common. Anyone who used to use Optifine knows that without an adblocker it was common for fake Optifine sites to be at the top of the results with a tiny marker saying "sponsored" or "ad".
How does preventing people from running software of their choice on their own device (what you call jailbreaking) prevent fraud in practice? It's a pretty strong claim you're making there. And it's being made frequently by institutions, yet I have never seen it actually explained and backed up with any real security model.
All the information and experience I ever got tells me this is security theater by institutions who try to distract from their atrocious security with some snake oil. But I'm willing to be convinced that there is more to it if presented with contraindicating information. So I'm interested in your case.
How did demanding control over your customers' devices and taking away their ability to run software of their choice in practice in quantifiable and attributable terms reduce fraud?
The app does fingerprinting and requires certain secure device profile characteristics before the app lets a user initiate certain kinds of financial transactions.
Those are based on APIs available from the mobile devices. Google and Apple can offer other means by which to secure these things, and to validate that the device hasn't been cracked and is submitting false attestations. But even a significant financial institution has no relationship with Apple on the dev side of things.. Apple does what it decides to do and the financial institution builds to what is available.
These controls work -- over time fraud and risk go down.
Google restricts sideloading "for your safety", while their app store is full of scam apps and F-Droid has zero malware. Don't you find this slightly illogical?
I'm surprised but happy to see you and so many others here saying this. In recent years it seemed like this 'hacker' community was all about Apple devices, but now that Google is going partway in the same direction, people aren't all just taking it.
Do you think there's two groups, and the people that cared simply went with Android and so there was never this outcry about installing free software on iOS, or that this will last only as long as the change still feels recent and like a new restriction?
iPhone users generally decided against owning the pocket computer full of sensors — that they carry around with them everywhere, put all their private data into, that they use to participate in society and that they use to inform themselves — when they bought an iPhone. Some of these people just do not see a smartphone as a computer but as a limited purpose device and do have an actual computer that they care to own. Most do not.
A lot of people here are looking for compromises. Any compromise on this means giving ground to Google's monopoly and the war on open computing and ultimately freedom.
This is exactly what Google intended. This is why they started off by announcing completely removing device owner chosen installs (this is not side loading! It's simply installing.) and announced only apps allowed by Google would be available for install.
They knew it would cause backlash. They anticipated that and planned ahead faking a compromise.
They are trying to boil us like frogs by so slowly raising the temperature so we do not notice. Whenever the water gets so warm that people do notice they cool it down a little. But they will turn up the the heat again!
This 24h window is designed to make device owner controlled installs as unattractive as possible. They try to reduce it as much as they can while having plausible deniability ("You can still install apps not whitelisted by us"). They want to get the concept of people installing software of their own choice onto their own device as far away from the mainstream as possible. They want to marginalize it. They want to slowly and quietly kill off the open Android app ecosystem by reducing the user base.
The next step will be them claiming that barely anyone is installing apps not signed by them anyway. First they make people jump through ridiculous hoops to install non whitelisted apps, then they use the fact that few people jump through these hoops to justify removing the ability altogether.
Google does not care about preventing scams. If they did they would do something against the massive amount of scam ads that they host. Scams are just their "think of the children".
Do not play by their playbook!
Do not give them ground!
We must not accept any restrictions on the software we run on our own devices. The concept of ownership, personal autonomy and choice are being dismantled. Our freedom is the target of a slow, long waging war. This is yet another attack.
We must not compromise with the attacker. We must not give them any centimeter of ground.
im just as much of a hater of this as the next guy, because i depend on custom apks for work sometimes. pushing custom apks over adb is apparently going to be fine, so if that holds true, i dont care about this. at the end of the day, buying an android phone is buying a google device. i dont get the righteousness here. wouldnt this energy be better spent on discussing how we could make a new open source os to rival that of google? why would anyone at google (company at the forefront of anti privacy measures) care about what some nerds on the internet think about privacy? its like an ant screaming in front of an approaching bulldozer.
It's a pretty dire situation. There are two major options. iOS is iOS. Android is at least somewhat open and Google free Android actually exists.
The problem is that you often need a smartphone running either Android or iOS to participate in modern life. Unfortunately when running Android many apps that one might be more or less forced to use do not just require AOSP, but expect the presence of the proprietary Google services malware.
If we want to create an independent mobile OS AOSP might actually be a good start. We're just faced with a world that is actively harmful to people having control over their device and data.
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