> 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...?
> 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."
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".
Cars worked fine without seatbelts too. Just because the world goes on doesn't mean we can't do better.
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.
OTOH the controlling way modern software behaves is an US artifact, so the differences are not necessarily clear-cut like this.
I grew up and live in Europe. I support the general idea of "regulation to make everyone safer" being an acceptable choice. At the same time, I vehemently oppose third-party interests reaching into my computing device and dictating what I can vs. cannot do with it.
But as you say, "global platforms with global impact and reach" - and so I can't set up my phone to conditionally read out text and voice messages aloud, because somewhere on the other side of the world, someone might get scammed into installing malware, therefore let's lock everything down and add remote attestation on top.
Unfortunately, the problem is political, not technological, and this here is but one facet of it. Ultimately, what SaaS does is give away all leverage: as users, it doesn't matter if we fully own the endpoints, or have a user-friendly vendor: any SaaS can ultimately decide not to serve a client that doesn't give the service a user-proof beachhead.
The point is "a warning" is not enough to communicate to people the gravity of what they are doing.
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.
OK so make the warning more annoying. Have a security quiz. Cooldown period of one day to enable. Require unlock via adb connected to laptop.
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.
- Don't reset it every 5 days / 5 hours / 5dBm blip in Wi-Fi strength, because this pretty much defeats end-user automation, whether persistent or event-driven. This is the current situation with "Wireless Debugging", otherwise cool trick for "rootless root", if it only didn't require being connected to Wi-Fi (and not just a Wi-Fi, but the same AP, breaking when device roams in multi-AP networks).
- Don't announce the fact that this is on to everyone. Many commercial vendors, including those who shouldn't and those who have no business caring, are very interested in knowing whether your device is running with debugging features enabled, and if so, deny service.
Unfortunately, in a SaaS world it's the service providers that have all the leverage - if they don't like your device, they can always refuse service. Increasingly many do.
You can add 5 layers of "are you sure you want to do this unsafe thing" and it just adds 5 easy steps to the scam where they say "agree to the annoying popup"
You could even make this an installation-time option. If you want to enable the switch afterwards, you have to do a factory reset. Then, the attackers convincing the victims would get nothing.
Or make sideloading available only after 24 hours since enabling it. I would enable it on my new devices and wait 24 hours before installing F-Droid and other apps. Not a problem. Scammers might wait one day too but it decreases the chances of success because friends and family members can interfere.
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.)
> 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's not just them. Every other SaaS, from banks to media providers to E2EE[0] chat clients to random apps whose makers feel insecure, or are obsessed with security [theater] best practices, just salivate at the thought of being able to check if you're a deviant running with root or debugging privileges, all because ${complex web of excuses that often sound plausible if you don't look too closely}. There's a huge demand for device attestation, remote or otherwise.
That's... brilliant. Enough work to not be able to talk it though over the phone to someone not technical. A sane default for people who don't know about security. And a simple enough procedure for the technically minded and brave.
It solves the 'smartest bear / dumbest human' overlap design concern in this situation.
If those bad decisions have a lot of higher order effects and they turn out to be very costly for society, then limiting freedom seems worth it.
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.
The reality in South East Asia doesn't support that. You're assuming that the potential victims are able to either use Android alternative or that they are willing and able to educate themselves about scams. The reality in these countries is that neither is the case in practice. Daily lives depend a lot on smartphones and they play a big role in cashless financial transactions. Networking effects play a big role here. Android devices are the only category that is both widely available and affordable.
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?
The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. We try to educate people about scams. We give them warnings that what they are doing can be dangerous if misused. If they choose to ignore those things and proceed anyway, the only further step society could take is to take away the person's freedom to choose. And that is an unacceptable solution.
Society takes away individual's freedom to choose all the time. You can't choose not to pay your taxes. You can't choose to board a passenger plane without passing a security check. You can't just get a loan without any guarantees to the bank etc.
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.
This is a terrible response as a Software Developer by the way. You can just use this to ignore any security concern.
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.
> Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom.
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.
Your post is addressing a strawman, not what I said. But to answer the words you so ungraciously put in my mouth:
> 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.
Your analogy is terrible because it doesn't do a proper accounting of "harm" and "risk."
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.
It's not like there's much of an alternative, but that's irrelevant anyway. Android is becoming more like an iPhone, and as long as the OS is able and willing to reliably report to anyone asking just how tightly it is locked down, we have zero choice in the matter, because increasingly many important apps (like bank and government apps) plain refuse to work if device is locked down less than it could be.
Right like someone who can only afford a $100 phone can buy the cheapest iPhone which is 5x more expensive.
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.
> At some point you need to treat people as adults, which includes letting them make very bad decisions if they insist on doing so.
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".
It's not a false equivalence at all. Both situations are taking away someone's control of something that they own, borne from a paternalistic desire to protect that person from themselves. If one is acceptable, the other should be. Conversely if one is unacceptable, the other should be unacceptable as well. Either paternalistic refusal to let people do as they wish is ok, or it isn't.
Maybe not, but I think that overextending any idea like that in the opposite direction of whatever point you are trying to make at least devolves into a "slippery slope" argument. For instance, is your point that all security on phones that impede freedom of the user (for instance, HTTPS, forced password on initial startup, not allowing apps to access certain parts of the phone without user permissions, verifying boot image signatures) should be removed as well?
No, that's not my point at all. Measures such as that are a tool which is in the hands of the user. 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. What Google is proposing takes control out of the user's hands and makes Google the sole arbiter of what is and is not allowed on the device.
None of the measures I mentioned are changeable by the user, except possibly sideloading an HTTPS certificate. That's the only way any of those measures even work; if it wasn't set as invariants by the OS, they would be bypassable.
>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?
The alcoholic knows the bad outcomes, and chooses to ignore them. The hapless Android user does not understand the negative consequences of sideloading. I think this makes for a substantial differerence between those two.
Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves. That should be obvious from the fact that very intelligent and technologically literate people too can fall for phishing attacks. Tell me for example, how many people in your life know how a bank would ACTUALLY contact you about a suspected hijacking and what the process should look like? And how about any of the dozens of other cover stories used? Not to mention the situations where the scammers can use literally the same method of first contact as the real thing (eg. spoofed).
...And the fact that for example email clients do their best to help them by obscuring the email address and only showing the display name, because that's obviously a good idea.
> Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves.
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 the proposal here, requiring developers to register their identities, doesn't actually impact consumers at all. They still have the ability to make the decision about whether or not to trust someone.
None of these things requires "locking down phones." Every single thing you've mentioned can be done in a smarter way that doesn't involve "individuals aren't allowed to modify the devices they purchase."
There is some world where somebody scammed through sideloading loses their life savings, and every country is politically fine with the customer, not the bank, taking the losses.
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 the actual bank app does that, or is even easy to fool into doing that, then the bank should be responsible. That's the world "regular people" want and it's the world as it should be.
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.
The legal infrastructure for banking and securities ownership has long had defaults for liability assignment.
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.
> 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.
But that is expensive, so my impression is that for non-sizeable transfers, and beyond banking, for basically anything dealing with lots of regular people doing regular-people-sized operations, the default in the industry is to try and outsource as much liability onto end-users. So instead of treating user's computers as untrusted and make system secure on the back end, the trend is to treat them as trusted, and then deal with increased risk by a) legal means that make end-users liable in practice (keeping users uninformed about their rights helps), and b) technical means that make end-user devices less untrusted.
b) is how we end up with developer registries and remote attestation. And the sad thing is, it scales well - if device and OS vendors cooperate (like they do today), they can enable "endpoint security" for everyone who seeks to externalize liability.
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.
Why do banks go through all the know-your-customer (KYC) process if not to identify the beneficial owner of every account? If they receive a transfer via fraud, then they either get it clawed back, have to pay it back, and/or get identified to law enforcement. If the last bank in the chain doesn't want to play by the rules, then other banks shouldn't transfer into them, or that bank itself should be held liable.
This is more or less how people expect things to work today ....
In the case of some knowing or blindfully unknowing money mule in the chain or at the end of the chain, the intermediary or final banks may not be at fault. The bank could have followed KYC procedures in that somebody with that name actually existed who controlled the account.
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.
I am the author of the letter and the coordinator of the signatories. We aren't saying "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is." Rather, we are pointing out that Android has progressively been enhanced over the years to make it more secure and to address emerging new threat models.
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".
I guess it's too late now, but I think "sufficient" is much too strong a word to use for that position, and puts Google in a position where they can disregard you because they "know" that existing measures aren't "sufficient."
There could be many other factors, like abysmal patch policies. Many vendors still only do Android Security Bulletins (which are only vulnerabilities marked as high and critical), do them late (despite a three month embargo for patches), very delayed device firmware updates, and sometimes only for two or three years.
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.
The app store does contain malware, although arguably less than the play store. Apple devices would be much more secure without the app store. Apple should remove the app store.
Not OP, but my experience was most of the malware-like apps on App Store were top ads of apps with names similar to the original ones: such as Whatsapp or Office.
Like you said, for years now they have added more and more restrictions to address various scams. So far none of them had any effect, other than annoying users of legitimate apps, because all the new restrictions were on the user side. This new approach restricts developers, but is actually a complete non-issue for most, since the vast majority of apps is distributed via Google Play already.
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?
Because without this early resistance, there wouldn't even be vague promises of hobbyist/student exemptions. I think it's important to make community objection to the entire idea known loud and clear, especially when changes like these are absolutely ratcheting.
If you can "coach someone to ignore standard security warnings", you can coach them to give you the two-factor authentication codes, or any number of other approaches to phishing.
> Installing an app that silently intercepts SMS/MMS data is a persistent technical compromise. Once the app is there, the attacker has ongoing access.
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.
Persistence allows the scammer free license to attempt password recoveries for every account the victim could possibly have. Other banks, retirement accounts, the victim's email account.
Scammer that thrive are greedy, but not too greedy. Easier to break into one type of account for 10 victims, than to break into 10 different account of one victim. Persistence is risk.
When the victim's relatives send them money because they need to eat and pay rent after handing everything over to the scammer, the persistent backdoor lets that money be drained as well... You're underestimating the persistence and ruthlessness of the scammers.
This is still not a root cause solution, it's just a mitigation. Because you do not require side loading to install malware. The play store and apple app store both contain malware, as well as apps which can be used for nefarious purposes, such as remote desktop.
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.
>The play store and apple app store both contain malware
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.
> Wow, that a major claim. What apps are malware, exactly?
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.
You'll then get more warnings if you want to give the sideloaded app additional permissions. And if they want to make the sideloading warnings more dire, that wouldn't be nearly as unreasonable.
Pins can still be phished. Just make the phishing a live proxy resembling the real site.
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.
The phisher’s app or login would be from a completely new device though.
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.
Never ending worm approach is to get remote control via methods on android or apple. Then scam other contacts.
It’s built into FaceTime. Need 3rd party apps for android.
Developer registration doesn't prevent this problem. Stolen ID can be found for a lot less money than what a day in a scam farm's operation will bring in. A criminal with access to Google can sign and deploy a new version of their scam app every hour of the day if they wish.
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.
My guess is that Android 17 will show the registered name of the developer of the app you're trying to install. With stolen IDs you can only get accounts for individual developers not for organisations.
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.
> Stolen ID can be found for a lot less money than what a day in a scam farm's operation will bring in.
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.
So they'll have a lead time building up a set of verified developers. These scams are pulled by organized crime syndicates, using human trafficking and beatings to keep their call centers manned with complicit workers.
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.
> 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.
> Someone will manufacture and sell bulk identities
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. It’s part of review scams. This won’t be much different. Just send the verification to empty houses and apartments.
You now need to have a variety of fake addresses you can use, since scammed addresses will get banned. You also need fake IDs. So again, the bar has now been raised from "run a bot to make fake Facebook accounts" to "I have a large number of physical addresses and the ability to create arbitrary fake government IDs".
> 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.
I still think it’s doable. Fake IDs aren’t exactly hard to come by. You could also pay randos a $30 gift card to sign up for a developer account and share access. Enough people will do it. I guess this does raise the cost a little though.
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.
Right, but this same problem (scamming) exists on PCs.
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?
Their point, applied to that situation, would be that if someone does argue for enforcing TPM-backed measured boot yadda yadda to address scamming, trying to counter it by dismissing scamming as not a real problem is useless.
Scamming is a real problem, but that does not imply this solution is the right way to go about it. There are other means to address this problem; they may not scale as well, but they also don't sacrifice computing freedoms.
I get it dude, but my wider point is that we need to question where this line of argumentation leads to.
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?
Of course it extends to PCs. It'd suck for us, but end users, software vendors, content providers, and service providers all benefit from a more restricted platform that can provide certain guarantees against malware, fraud, piracy, and so forth. It's pathologically programmer-brained to assume that the good old days of being able to run arbitrary code on a networked computing device would last forever. That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly.
The "programmer-brained" assumption is that I will be able to write any program and run it on my machine and that this ability isn't reserved for only me or some limited class of people and that I can share what I write with others. One big plus of the current stye of AI will be that "end users" will be able to write simple programs and will value this ability. Thus helping protect general purpose computing from this bit of evil for a while longer.
Users get way more out of it when the device is free. Even if they don't use this option, it makes it easier to set up competing services. This includes ones that would never be allowed in an official store because they're DRM-free alternatives to big streaming services but still offer all the same content. The existence of such alternatives, if they are easy to use, can force the big services to become more user-friendly. Just as happened back then with Napster.
Also every user is free to simply not use the option of installing things outside of the store.
> This includes ones that would never be allowed in an official store because they're DRM-free alternatives to big streaming services but still offer all the same content.
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.
> That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly.
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.
There simply isn't a known solution to this problem. If you give users the ability to install unverified apps, then bad actors can trick them into installing bad ones that steal their auth codes and whatnot. If you want to disallow certain apps then you have to make decisions about what apps (stores) are "blessed" and what criteria are used to make those distinctions, necessarily restricting what users can do with their own devices.
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.
> There simply isn't a known solution to this problem. If you give users the ability to install unverified apps, then bad actors can trick them into installing bad ones that steal their auth codes and whatnot.
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 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 solution would be a "noob mode" that disables sideloading and other security-critical features, which can be chosen when the device is first turned on and requires a factory reset to deactivate. People who still choose expert mode even though they are beginners would then only have themselves to blame.
This is just a variant of the "complicated unlocking mechanism" I was talking about. It still screws over everything not coming from the play store because the installation process for them essentially becomes a huge hassel, that even involves factory resetting their device, that most people won't want to deal with.
I'm going to assume you're referring to auth codes, especially the ones sent via SMS? In which case yes, banks should definitely stop using those but that alone doesn't solve the overarching issue.
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.
I'm not sure if you understand what makes passkeys phishing-resistant?
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.
I understand how passkeys work. You don't need the legitimate app's credentials, we're talking about phishing attacks, you're trying to bring the victim to giving you access/control to their account without them realizing that that's what is happening.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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'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.
With banks, typically a combination of your account number, pin and some confirmation code sent via email or SMS. And of course unregistering your previous device. Not sure where you're going with this though?
I understand how passkeys work. You don't need the legitimate app's credentials, we're talking about phishing attacks, you're trying to bring the victim to giving you access/control to their account without them realizing that that's what is happening.
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.
Correction: nothing prevents the attacker from using the app's legit package ID other than requiring the uninstall of the existing app.
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.
If the side loaded app does not have permission to use the passkeys and cannot somehow get the user to approve passkey access of the new app, that would be a good alternative to still allow custom apps.
I don't think you understand. This exists _today_, regardless of how you install apps, because attackers can't spoof app signatures. If I don't have Bank of America's private signing key, I cannot make an app that requests passkeys for bankofamerica.com, because bankofamerica.com publishes a file [0] that says "only apps signed with this key fingerprint are allowed to request passkeys for bankofamerica.com" and Android's credential service checks that file.
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.
I like the idea of requiring extra work to get notification access. But really what all these scams pray on are time sensitivity, take that away and you solve the problem in many ways. For example, your bank shouldn't let you drain your account without either being in person or having a mandatory 24hr waiting period. Same could be done with side loaded apps getting notifications, if it's side loaded and wants to read notifications, then it needs to wait 24 hrs. Mostly it won't ever matter.
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.
>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."
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 also cut yourself with a kitchen knife but nobody proposes banning kitchen knives.
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)
In this example we still don't require you to register with anyone to buy a knife, get the blessing of some institution to sell knives, or, as in this case, get a certification before you can start making knives.
its crazy that different things, like knives and app stores, have different rules. maybe thats why the quip about the knife sounded super cool but fell apart as an analogy for this scenario when thought about 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.
I think it's important to consider the intent of those laws, too. They are primarily or even exclusively to prevent you from hurting others with knives. They are not really intended to protect you from cutting yourself in your own home. So I think the parent's comment still holds weight.
sorry, should say "carry", not "buy". most states have a maximum length you can carry (4-5.5 inches is common).
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.
As kevin_thibedeau points out elsewhere in the thread, he's not necessarily wrong. In many states and foreign countries it's illegal to carry a large knife in public without a reason and I'm sure purchases are restricted in some places as well. Most people are more or less OK with that, it seems, so there historically hasn't been a lot of pushback.
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.
the whack-a-mole problem is real but mandatory registration doesn't actually fix it for sophisticated actors -- they'll just use burner entities or buy aged developer accounts. it mostly raises costs for hobbyists and side projects. the permission-gating approach dfabulich mentions (require registration only for notification/SMS interception APIs) seems more targeted.
I have a radical solution - it should not be possible to contact someone unsolicited.
All phone calls, SMS, emails, and instant messages should be blocked unless the other party is in my contacts or I have reached out to them first (plus opt-in contact from contacts of contacts, etc). Ideally, cryptographically verified.
I would argue this is the real solution to spam and scamming - why on earth are random people allowed to contact me without my consent? Phone numbers or email addresses being all you need to contact me should be an artifact of an earlier time, just like treating social security numbers as secret.
I realize this isn't super practical to transition existing systems to (though spam warnings on email and calls helps, I suppose, and maybe it could be made opt-in). I dearly hope the next major form of communication works this way, and we eventually leave behind the old methods.
>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...?
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.
I wonder if putting this choice on the user would be most appropriate?
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.
That attack vector is just a symptom. It’s unfathomably foolish to use two-factor authentication via something as easy to intercept as SMS. Two-factor authentication should be done using a separate hardware token that generates time-based one-time codes. Anything else is basically security theater.
One time codes are still vulnerable to phishing by a site that proxies the bank's authentication challenge. You need something like FIDO2 where a challenge-response only works when the relying party ID is correct.
There will _always_ be a need to balance between safety and the cost of adding more safety. There is no point at which safety is complete; there is always more that can be done, but the cost gets higher and higher.
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"
> 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.
> I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."
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.
> the malware captures their two-factor authentication codes
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.
Codes arrive via SMS, which is available to all apps with the READ_SMS permission. This isn't an OS vuln. It is a property of the fact that SMS messages are delivered to a phone number and not an app.
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.
I think there's room to raise the bar of required tech competency without registration.
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.
Maybe we should take away peoples' phone calls, ability to use knives, walking on the street, swimming in water, drinking liquids of any kinds, alcohol, trains, while we are at it.
I don’t want to be too flippant, but I think there is a real trade off across many aspects of life between “freedom” and “safety”.
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).
> In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector.
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.
Google's announcement is just trolling, there's an order of magnitude more scams on the Play store and they don't call for its closure.
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?
> 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.
Agree with this middle path you point out. On one hand, I do not want some apps to be distributed anonymously, I need to know who is behind it in order to trust the app. On the other hand, many apps are benign.
Typo squatting is a thing, and so are Unicode homographs.
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.
Something like Thunderbird might be an exception, but also domain confusion exists, so in the general case, most likely not because most users are susceptible to this.
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.
> but I think the community needs a better response
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.
I agree with Epic. It should be like on windows or macOS where you can register, get notarized, and then distribute without scare screens. I don’t see why phones are inherently different than computers.
The problem with mandatory developer registration, is that it gives Google and Governments the ability to veto apps.
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.
No judgement whatsoever, but for almost everyone they too will think, no big deal you only install software through stores right? Nothing changes for them, in fact they can't conceive of an alternative anymore.
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.
It's worse than that. Google will be able to track who's using a particular app because it has to be installed the official way. This means for example that anyone who has installed an ICE Tracking app will be reported to the government and perhaps added to a terrorist list.
No you can still install APKs offline but they have to be signed (likely enforced by Google Play Services). Not to mention you can still install unisgned APKs like before with adb. Which doesn't make this any better of course.
The judge told Google that Apple is not anti-competitive because Apple has no competitors on it's platform (this all stemming from the Epic lawsuits).
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.
Like many things in the US, this should be settled by congress not judges.
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.
"Like many things in the US, this should be settled by congress"
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.
There were parallel anti-competitive behavior cases brought against Apple and Google.
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.
It is a non-sensical ruling. But IIRC the reason was basically that while Apple and Google did basically the same shit, only Google kept a written record of their monopolistic behaviour, so only Google was found guilty.
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.
The thing that everyone here ignores is that the friction isn't just for safety. It's by design. For some reason, everyone is giving Google as much benefit of the doubt as possible. But no, they want to drive out small developers in general, and this is just one piece of the puzzle. Google has already put up unrelated barriers to publishing apps on Google Play, required every app developer to dox themselves to every user (meanwhile Apple is far more permissive and allows an opt-out for non-commercial apps), they downrank apps by small developers, use alternate UX that disincentivizes installing lesser known apps, put up big scary warnings like "This app isn't installed often" or "Fewer people engage with this app" on the pages of those apps. The only explanation is that they want more money and less upkeep and moderation with the pesky small developers, and the real money-makers are the big corporate apps. They're recreating "the rich get richer" in their microcosm.
Friction does matter. Yes, criminals will create fake accounts with stolen IDs and stolen credit cards. But creating 1,000s of these is hard. Creating polymorphic banking trojans is simple.
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.
If you can convince someone over the phone to install malware thru a million "don't do this" screens, you can convince them to just give you their login credentials. Which is both easier, cheaper, and, I imagine, more effective.
Banning apps installation outside PlayStore will be a disaster for power-ish users and will start a fight between Google and community. I abandoned rooting my devices because I could achieve all I wanted through apps (mostly ad- and nag-freedom, it's impossible to be online without ad blocking). But all these were downloaded as APKs. I cannot imagine how the first day without these will be.
"Don't be evil" → "Don't be evil without registering first and uploading your government ID."
The most telling detail is the sequencing. Google spent years in court arguing Android is open to fend off antitrust regulators, won key battles on that basis, and is now quietly closing the door they swore under oath was permanently propped open. The antitrust defense was the product roadmap's cover story.
And framing this as security is particularly rich from the company whose own Play Store routinely hosts malware that passes their review. The problem they're solving isn't "unverified developers distribute harmful apps" — it's "unverified developers distribute apps we can't monetize or control."
To be honest, if both Android and iOS were walled gardens, I'd choose iOS every time. I choose Android specifically because of its openness. But if that weren't the case, I'd prefer the smoother UX and stronger Apple ecosystem.
Precisely! Google doesn't care one bit about civil society; it cares about power to itself even if this means punching freedom and liberty in the face. Personally I think it'll be a good thing if this restriction finally wakes up people to seek alternatives to Google.
> 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.
I think we're about to see an explosion in "mini apps". It's taken 10+ years for us to catch up to WeChat and China but this regulation and other issues are going to block a lot of innovation and we're better off surfacing tiny PWA or SPA like apps that get loaded in native apps or we just do away with that entirely. The time has come.
Elon's vision for the X "everything" app. It's great for them, now every single thing you do has the full gamut of privacy permissions. Playing a "mini-game"? Full accurate GPS coordinates available to it because you also have the ride-hailing "mini-app".
Isn't the obvious solution to use an AOSP fork that does not have to comply with the registration requirements? Distributions like Graphene and Lineage are completely unaffected.
Is using a cheap Android device (the cheapest Android phones are less than $100 on Amazon) an option? The idea is to use that phone for 2FA or whatever is app is necessary for, and use a degoogled device for your other day-to-day activities. It's not ideal because you need to spend some extra money, but it buys you a lot of privacy.
Does the web app for the bank actually selectively block mobile phones? I just checked and Chase here in the US lets me log in on Brave Mobile on iOS. Perhaps your bank lets you log on in the browser.
My understanding (I'm in the US too) is that apps in many other countries don't even have a web app equivalent. If you want your money, you need an authentic android phone and a closed-source app. Or, you can buy a plane ticket somewhere else.
No, because many apps refuse to run on third-party distros due to misguided notions of them being insecure. It's easy to say "just don't use those apps" but in reality, people are rightly unwilling to put up with any friction and so will simply continue to use Google's version of the OS.
Many people online and in person telling me "Google backed down" or "Google has an advanced flow" are typically referring to these two statements from Google staff:
> 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.
It matters to me because I'm reading it now and feel more informed about this problem. Throwing the towel in and saying it's all pointless isn't helpful.
It's not throwing in the towel, it's about doing things that we the people can actually do.
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.
Because the company either has to address it, or stop pretending it's "listening to concerns" or whatever. Even if it doesn't change the outcome, it makes it clearer that the company is engaging in bad faith.
It's something apps that will soon break can point their users to so they know to blame Google and a bunch of incompetent governments.
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.
Would rather a more robust and distributed app store system that figures out how to police these edge cases of fraud rather than one vendor (Apple or Google) whose monopolies push developers into subscriptionware across the board. Something more akin to how internic moved from one domain name registrar to what we have today, chock full of competition and new top level domains.
It feels like independent development on devices has slowed in recent years. More stores appealing to different developer models/tools and monetization strategies please.
Something like 7 iOS phones are sold every second of the day and there are even more Android phones sold. The number of people who care about this issue is far too few for any kind of boycott to be noticed by the handset makers. The only option is to appeal to Google's sense of what's right.
In the time it took you to read this comment, 200 phones were sold.
Highly technically knowledgeable people are more influential in this sphere than the average consumer. If developers hate your device and love your competitor, that's a real problem.
I would if there was a viable mobile phone OS I could switch to. iOS isn't any better. Linux phones, sadly, aren't very practical for daily use. AOSP based projects also have many limitations, and are still dependent on Google.
What phone are you considering? Sailfish still doesn't seem very successful and mobile Linux barely boots on anything that performs better than a fifteen year old budget device.
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.
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.
My condolences, that sucks that you’re stuck in such an authoritarian country. If you look at the PostmarketOS site, you may be able to find a legal phone (weird to type that phrase) that can be reflashed. Or you could buy one while on vacation, my guess is they don’t check models at the border if it looks like a personal device.
Illegal in Brazil per the Digital Child and Adolescent Statute. Operating systems are legally required to provide age verification functionality in a manner approved by the government.
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).
Indeed, and since Brazil now has mandatory age checking in the OS, it's illegal to own or operate such phones in the country, thus they will never be certified by ANATEL.
Just here to register my disapproval of this, and to remind everyone that you should support Linux phones if you’re against it. Or Graphene OS, at the very least, even though this still supports Google due to the requirement for a Pixel phone.
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!
As far as I know, it's implemented in the proprietary part of Android (Google Mobile Services, GMS), so it won't affect LineageOS users as long as they don't install the GMS.
If I may advocate for the non HN partisan position here.
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.
For me this change is a problem not just because of the ID upload to Google but mainly because it's another nail in the coffin of native software solutions. It increases friction and anything that increases friction is bad.
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.
That's the status quo, though. Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store are essentially unmoderated. The sheer scale of them and both platforms' technical architectures prohibits either company from properly validating their stores' contents - they can't even catch the easy cases, like all the apps that impersonate ChatGPT. The main thing they manage to do is inconvenience innocent indie devs once in a while.
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.
When there were many different app stores to choose from, nobody would be forced to use an unmoderated app store. What happened to individual freedom and responsibility?
I would need to see a widely used and trusted 3rd party store before leaving Google Play became a consideration. I'm interested, but not an early adopter. It's also unclear if any store that reaches this point doesn't institute similar moderation techniques. Scale incentivizes bad actors, which in turn requires good moderation.
The real issue is that mandatory registration doesn't actually stop scammers. It stops hobbyist developers and small open source projects.
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.
The permission problem also affects normal apps. Things like KDE Connect quickly become useless without advanced permissions, for instance.
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).
Sure thing, as long as it doesn't require any permissions. I have installed multiple apks on my phone from unknown people. Note that Google's requirement is also for completely permissionless apps like games.
Nice strawman. People want the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to install some APK, they are not saying every APK under the sun is trustworthy.
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.
Android already tells users when they're installing software from outside the Play Store and shows big scary warnings if Play Protect is turned off. What else do you want? If I want to install something from Sketchy McMalwareson after all that, that's my phone and my business.
Side loading is an interesting hobby horse for hackers. It causes material harm to a lot of people. But hackers want to keep it anyway for themselves for ideological and aesthetic reasons.
Wym? Google says it’s the one to decide. They are doing this because side loading causes fraud. There is pressure and lobbying (like this open letter) to stop them from locking it down.
It was a catchy rethorical question. Desired emphasis on the fact that a smartphone is a computing device.
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.
Walled gardens have less fraud and malware because it's less open. But developers prefer open source decentralized software. Of course, we are technologically literate enough to avoid the fraud. It's similar to drug decriminalization or the legalization of sports gambling.
Okay, then every book, every email, every text message, every comment, and every letter should be signed by a third party that's verified your ID. After all, there's speech which can cause material harm and free speech is just an ideological thing. It'd be dangerous if we allowed unsigned messages to be sent between people.
The most controversial claim in this letter is in the section that "Existing Measures Are Sufficient."
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...?
> 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."
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".
Cars worked fine without seatbelts too. Just because the world goes on doesn't mean we can't do better.
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.
OTOH the controlling way modern software behaves is an US artifact, so the differences are not necessarily clear-cut like this.
I grew up and live in Europe. I support the general idea of "regulation to make everyone safer" being an acceptable choice. At the same time, I vehemently oppose third-party interests reaching into my computing device and dictating what I can vs. cannot do with it.
But as you say, "global platforms with global impact and reach" - and so I can't set up my phone to conditionally read out text and voice messages aloud, because somewhere on the other side of the world, someone might get scammed into installing malware, therefore let's lock everything down and add remote attestation on top.
Unfortunately, the problem is political, not technological, and this here is but one facet of it. Ultimately, what SaaS does is give away all leverage: as users, it doesn't matter if we fully own the endpoints, or have a user-friendly vendor: any SaaS can ultimately decide not to serve a client that doesn't give the service a user-proof beachhead.
What if we asked users if they want extra protection? I think that would be nice..
This is the status quo. APK installation is disabled by default, and there is a warning when you go to enable it.
The point is "a warning" is not enough to communicate to people the gravity of what they are doing.
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.
OK so make the warning more annoying. Have a security quiz. Cooldown period of one day to enable. Require unlock via adb connected to laptop.
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.
> Require unlock via adb connected to laptop.
Fine, just:
- Don't reset it every 5 days / 5 hours / 5dBm blip in Wi-Fi strength, because this pretty much defeats end-user automation, whether persistent or event-driven. This is the current situation with "Wireless Debugging", otherwise cool trick for "rootless root", if it only didn't require being connected to Wi-Fi (and not just a Wi-Fi, but the same AP, breaking when device roams in multi-AP networks).
- Don't announce the fact that this is on to everyone. Many commercial vendors, including those who shouldn't and those who have no business caring, are very interested in knowing whether your device is running with debugging features enabled, and if so, deny service.
Unfortunately, in a SaaS world it's the service providers that have all the leverage - if they don't like your device, they can always refuse service. Increasingly many do.
You can add 5 layers of "are you sure you want to do this unsafe thing" and it just adds 5 easy steps to the scam where they say "agree to the annoying popup"
You could even make this an installation-time option. If you want to enable the switch afterwards, you have to do a factory reset. Then, the attackers convincing the victims would get nothing.
Or make sideloading available only after 24 hours since enabling it. I would enable it on my new devices and wait 24 hours before installing F-Droid and other apps. Not a problem. Scammers might wait one day too but it decreases the chances of success because friends and family members can interfere.
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.)
> 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's not just them. Every other SaaS, from banks to media providers to E2EE[0] chat clients to random apps whose makers feel insecure, or are obsessed with security [theater] best practices, just salivate at the thought of being able to check if you're a deviant running with root or debugging privileges, all because ${complex web of excuses that often sound plausible if you don't look too closely}. There's a huge demand for device attestation, remote or otherwise.
--
[0] - End-to-end Enshittified.
And now if I want to send a .apk to someone, they have to wipe their entire phone to install it? No thanks.
That's... brilliant. Enough work to not be able to talk it though over the phone to someone not technical. A sane default for people who don't know about security. And a simple enough procedure for the technically minded and brave.
It solves the 'smartest bear / dumbest human' overlap design concern in this situation.
then make the unlock cost money
relatively easy for devs, but hard to scale for scammers
It's either that or as suggested, hard require developer validation for specific API permissions.
If those bad decisions have a lot of higher order effects and they turn out to be very costly for society, then limiting freedom seems worth it.
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.
The reality in South East Asia doesn't support that. You're assuming that the potential victims are able to either use Android alternative or that they are willing and able to educate themselves about scams. The reality in these countries is that neither is the case in practice. Daily lives depend a lot on smartphones and they play a big role in cashless financial transactions. Networking effects play a big role here. Android devices are the only category that is both widely available and affordable.
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?
The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. We try to educate people about scams. We give them warnings that what they are doing can be dangerous if misused. If they choose to ignore those things and proceed anyway, the only further step society could take is to take away the person's freedom to choose. And that is an unacceptable solution.
Society takes away individual's freedom to choose all the time. You can't choose not to pay your taxes. You can't choose to board a passenger plane without passing a security check. You can't just get a loan without any guarantees to the bank etc.
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.
> The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do.
Nope. We could, for example, ask developers to register with their legal identity to release apps.
That would be worse than the status quo.
the open source community should ask for their own install key and that's it
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.
This is a terrible response as a Software Developer by the way. You can just use this to ignore any security concern.
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.
> Life is not safe, nor can it be made safe without taking away freedom.
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.
Thank goodness there are FOSS options, even for mobile phones, and none of us are required to accept proprietary junk.
If they make FOSS illegal, guess I’ll be a criminal. Come and take it.
Your post is addressing a strawman, not what I said. But to answer the words you so ungraciously put in my mouth:
> 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.
Your analogy is terrible because it doesn't do a proper accounting of "harm" and "risk."
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.
No, this is a terrible take. People’s entire financial future is at stake, including in the third 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.
That's right, it's your decision to use Android. If you choose to do so, that's on you.
It's not like there's much of an alternative, but that's irrelevant anyway. Android is becoming more like an iPhone, and as long as the OS is able and willing to reliably report to anyone asking just how tightly it is locked down, we have zero choice in the matter, because increasingly many important apps (like bank and government apps) plain refuse to work if device is locked down less than it could be.
You're right, all Android users who are upset about this change are free to switch to iOS.
Right like someone who can only afford a $100 phone can buy the cheapest iPhone which is 5x more expensive.
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.
I think that OP's point was that the alternative is even more locked down. There is no option for people who don't want to be nannied.
If there was a choice to a non-walled garden. It has been taken away, how can you bank without one of the two?
> At some point you need to treat people as adults, which includes letting them make very bad decisions if they insist on doing so.
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.
It's not a false equivalence at all. Both situations are taking away someone's control of something that they own, borne from a paternalistic desire to protect that person from themselves. If one is acceptable, the other should be. Conversely if one is unacceptable, the other should be unacceptable as well. Either paternalistic refusal to let people do as they wish is ok, or it isn't.
Maybe not, but I think that overextending any idea like that in the opposite direction of whatever point you are trying to make at least devolves into a "slippery slope" argument. For instance, is your point that all security on phones that impede freedom of the user (for instance, HTTPS, forced password on initial startup, not allowing apps to access certain parts of the phone without user permissions, verifying boot image signatures) should be removed as well?
No, that's not my point at all. Measures such as that are a tool which is in the hands of the user. 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. What Google is proposing takes control out of the user's hands and makes Google the sole arbiter of what is and is not allowed on the device.
None of the measures I mentioned are changeable by the user, except possibly sideloading an HTTPS certificate. That's the only way any of those measures even work; if it wasn't set as invariants by the OS, they would be bypassable.
>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?
But it's not a slippery slope, because it's not taking it to the next level. It's the same level, just a different thing.
The alcoholic knows the bad outcomes, and chooses to ignore them. The hapless Android user does not understand the negative consequences of sideloading. I think this makes for a substantial differerence between those two.
Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves. That should be obvious from the fact that very intelligent and technologically literate people too can fall for phishing attacks. Tell me for example, how many people in your life know how a bank would ACTUALLY contact you about a suspected hijacking and what the process should look like? And how about any of the dozens of other cover stories used? Not to mention the situations where the scammers can use literally the same method of first contact as the real thing (eg. spoofed). ...And the fact that for example email clients do their best to help them by obscuring the email address and only showing the display name, because that's obviously a good idea.
> Protecting from scams isn't protection from the victim themselves.
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 the proposal here, requiring developers to register their identities, doesn't actually impact consumers at all. They still have the ability to make the decision about whether or not to trust someone.
None of these things requires "locking down phones." Every single thing you've mentioned can be done in a smarter way that doesn't involve "individuals aren't allowed to modify the devices they purchase."
You can't make a statement like that and provide no examples. What are some of your ideas for doing that?
There is some world where somebody scammed through sideloading loses their life savings, and every country is politically fine with the customer, not the bank, taking the losses.
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 the actual bank app does that, or is even easy to fool into doing that, then the bank should be responsible. That's the world "regular people" want and it's the world as it should be.
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.
The legal infrastructure for banking and securities ownership has long had defaults for liability assignment.
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.
> 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.
But that is expensive, so my impression is that for non-sizeable transfers, and beyond banking, for basically anything dealing with lots of regular people doing regular-people-sized operations, the default in the industry is to try and outsource as much liability onto end-users. So instead of treating user's computers as untrusted and make system secure on the back end, the trend is to treat them as trusted, and then deal with increased risk by a) legal means that make end-users liable in practice (keeping users uninformed about their rights helps), and b) technical means that make end-user devices less untrusted.
b) is how we end up with developer registries and remote attestation. And the sad thing is, it scales well - if device and OS vendors cooperate (like they do today), they can enable "endpoint security" for everyone who seeks to externalize liability.
Keeeep going.
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.
Why do banks go through all the know-your-customer (KYC) process if not to identify the beneficial owner of every account? If they receive a transfer via fraud, then they either get it clawed back, have to pay it back, and/or get identified to law enforcement. If the last bank in the chain doesn't want to play by the rules, then other banks shouldn't transfer into them, or that bank itself should be held liable.
This is more or less how people expect things to work today ....
In the case of some knowing or blindfully unknowing money mule in the chain or at the end of the chain, the intermediary or final banks may not be at fault. The bank could have followed KYC procedures in that somebody with that name actually existed who controlled the account.
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.
I'm a "regular" person, as are all the signatories, and you don't speak for us.
I am the author of the letter and the coordinator of the signatories. We aren't saying "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is." Rather, we are pointing out that Android has progressively been enhanced over the years to make it more secure and to address emerging new threat models.
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/...
I guess it's too late now, but I think "sufficient" is much too strong a word to use for that position, and puts Google in a position where they can disregard you because they "know" that existing measures aren't "sufficient."
"Existing measures are working," perhaps?
Would you say that iOS ecosystem suffers the same rate of malware as Android?
There could be many other factors, like abysmal patch policies. Many vendors still only do Android Security Bulletins (which are only vulnerabilities marked as high and critical), do them late (despite a three month embargo for patches), very delayed device firmware updates, and sometimes only for two or three years.
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.
The app store does contain malware, although arguably less than the play store. Apple devices would be much more secure without the app store. Apple should remove the app store.
Not OP, but my experience was most of the malware-like apps on App Store were top ads of apps with names similar to the original ones: such as Whatsapp or Office.
Of course not.
In other news, a new study shows that cutting off your feet is 100% effective against athlete's foot.
Haven't seen that one but I've seen working medication, it does exist on the market and does work, why not switching to use it?
Like you said, for years now they have added more and more restrictions to address various scams. So far none of them had any effect, other than annoying users of legitimate apps, because all the new restrictions were on the user side. This new approach restricts developers, but is actually a complete non-issue for most, since the vast majority of apps is distributed via Google Play already.
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?
Because without this early resistance, there wouldn't even be vague promises of hobbyist/student exemptions. I think it's important to make community objection to the entire idea known loud and clear, especially when changes like these are absolutely ratcheting.
> all evidence points to them working fairly well.
What is this evidence? Please share it.
If you can "coach someone to ignore standard security warnings", you can coach them to give you the two-factor authentication codes, or any number of other approaches to phishing.
Installing an app that silently intercepts SMS/MMS data is a persistent technical compromise. Once the app is there, the attacker has ongoing access.
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.
> Installing an app that silently intercepts SMS/MMS data is a persistent technical compromise. Once the app is there, the attacker has ongoing access.
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.
Persistence allows the scammer free license to attempt password recoveries for every account the victim could possibly have. Other banks, retirement accounts, the victim's email account.
Scammer that thrive are greedy, but not too greedy. Easier to break into one type of account for 10 victims, than to break into 10 different account of one victim. Persistence is risk.
When the victim's relatives send them money because they need to eat and pay rent after handing everything over to the scammer, the persistent backdoor lets that money be drained as well... You're underestimating the persistence and ruthlessness of the scammers.
This is still not a root cause solution, it's just a mitigation. Because you do not require side loading to install malware. The play store and apple app store both contain malware, as well as apps which can be used for nefarious purposes, such as remote desktop.
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.
>The play store and apple app store both contain malware
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.
> Wow, that a major claim. What apps are malware, exactly?
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.
> Installing an app that silently intercepts SMS/MMS data is a persistent technical compromise.
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 2-factor SMS messages usually say: "Do not give this code to anyone! The bank will NEVER ask you for this code!".
The sideloading warning is much much milder, something like "are you sure you want to install this?".
You'll then get more warnings if you want to give the sideloaded app additional permissions. And if they want to make the sideloading warnings more dire, that wouldn't be nearly as unreasonable.
the main issue is the bank using sms and OTP apps instead of something like passkeys and mandatory in bank setup.
One of my banks uses a card reader and pin to log in, seems more secure.
Pins can still be phished. Just make the phishing a live proxy resembling the real site.
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.
That’s just as bad. You need to take out the human error out of the equation.
> The bank will NEVER ask you for this code!
> Please enter the code we sent you in the app.
lol, lmao even
yeah the thing is, if someone can social engineer you on the phone and make you do their bidding, you've lost no matter what
The phisher’s app or login would be from a completely new device though.
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.
Never ending worm approach is to get remote control via methods on android or apple. Then scam other contacts. It’s built into FaceTime. Need 3rd party apps for android.
Developer registration doesn't prevent this problem. Stolen ID can be found for a lot less money than what a day in a scam farm's operation will bring in. A criminal with access to Google can sign and deploy a new version of their scam app every hour of the day if they wish.
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.
My guess is that Android 17 will show the registered name of the developer of the app you're trying to install. With stolen IDs you can only get accounts for individual developers not for organisations.
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.
> Stolen ID can be found for a lot less money than what a day in a scam farm's operation will bring in.
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.
So they'll have a lead time building up a set of verified developers. These scams are pulled by organized crime syndicates, using human trafficking and beatings to keep their call centers manned with complicit workers.
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.
> 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.
All it will do is create a new low risk black market job. Someone will manufacture and sell bulk identities like they do fake social accounts.
> Someone will manufacture and sell bulk identities
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. It’s part of review scams. This won’t be much different. Just send the verification to empty houses and apartments.
You now need to have a variety of fake addresses you can use, since scammed addresses will get banned. You also need fake IDs. So again, the bar has now been raised from "run a bot to make fake Facebook accounts" to "I have a large number of physical addresses and the ability to create arbitrary fake government IDs".
> 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.
I still think it’s doable. Fake IDs aren’t exactly hard to come by. You could also pay randos a $30 gift card to sign up for a developer account and share access. Enough people will do it. I guess this does raise the cost a little though.
Does your logic extend to PCs? If not, why?
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.
You missed their point. They are not saying that what Google is doing is a good way to address the underlying problem Google says it is addressing.
They are saying that claiming the underlying problem is not real or not big enough to need addressing is an ineffective way to argue.
Right, but this same problem (scamming) exists on PCs.
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?
Their point, applied to that situation, would be that if someone does argue for enforcing TPM-backed measured boot yadda yadda to address scamming, trying to counter it by dismissing scamming as not a real problem is useless.
Scamming is a real problem, but that does not imply this solution is the right way to go about it. There are other means to address this problem; they may not scale as well, but they also don't sacrifice computing freedoms.
I get it dude, but my wider point is that we need to question where this line of argumentation leads to.
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?
Of course it extends to PCs. It'd suck for us, but end users, software vendors, content providers, and service providers all benefit from a more restricted platform that can provide certain guarantees against malware, fraud, piracy, and so forth. It's pathologically programmer-brained to assume that the good old days of being able to run arbitrary code on a networked computing device would last forever. That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly.
The "programmer-brained" assumption is that I will be able to write any program and run it on my machine and that this ability isn't reserved for only me or some limited class of people and that I can share what I write with others. One big plus of the current stye of AI will be that "end users" will be able to write simple programs and will value this ability. Thus helping protect general purpose computing from this bit of evil for a while longer.
Exactly. I own a few dozen computers, if you count some low powered SBCs. But even those can run lightweight Linux.
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!
Users get way more out of it when the device is free. Even if they don't use this option, it makes it easier to set up competing services. This includes ones that would never be allowed in an official store because they're DRM-free alternatives to big streaming services but still offer all the same content. The existence of such alternatives, if they are easy to use, can force the big services to become more user-friendly. Just as happened back then with Napster.
Also every user is free to simply not use the option of installing things outside of the store.
> This includes ones that would never be allowed in an official store because they're DRM-free alternatives to big streaming services but still offer all the same content.
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.
Obviously I disagree completely. But it is still sad to see this kind of reasoning on HN of all places :(
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for $29.95/month.
Show HN: O'Brien (YC S29), new AI-powered Boot as a Service provider
> That freedom must be balanced against the interests of the rest of society to avoid risk from certain kinds of harm which can easily proliferate in an environment where any program can run with the full authority of the owner and malware spreads willy-nilly.
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.
Safety fascists won’t stop until every human interaction requires permission.
It’s a good time to buy a pallet of old SFF computers, just in case.
There simply isn't a known solution to this problem. If you give users the ability to install unverified apps, then bad actors can trick them into installing bad ones that steal their auth codes and whatnot. If you want to disallow certain apps then you have to make decisions about what apps (stores) are "blessed" and what criteria are used to make those distinctions, necessarily restricting what users can do with their own devices.
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.
> There simply isn't a known solution to this problem. If you give users the ability to install unverified apps, then bad actors can trick them into installing bad ones that steal their auth codes and whatnot.
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 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.
I don’t know if I agree, but we are very much in a world where that would make sense.
Why do drug companies deserve justice for developing and pushing heroin-analogues, but not tech companies?
Our work has real consequences.
The solution would be a "noob mode" that disables sideloading and other security-critical features, which can be chosen when the device is first turned on and requires a factory reset to deactivate. People who still choose expert mode even though they are beginners would then only have themselves to blame.
This is just a variant of the "complicated unlocking mechanism" I was talking about. It still screws over everything not coming from the play store because the installation process for them essentially becomes a huge hassel, that even involves factory resetting their device, that most people won't want to deal with.
This should be voted higher, it quite literally is this simple.
We know how to do hardware-bound phishing-resistant credentials now, it is a solved problem.
I'm going to assume you're referring to auth codes, especially the ones sent via SMS? In which case yes, banks should definitely stop using those but that alone doesn't solve the overarching issue.
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.
SMS 2FA is neither hardware-bound nor phishing resistant, I'm referring to hardware-bound phishing-resistant 2FA methods like passkeys.
Read my previous comment again. Passkeys are nice, but they don't solve the problem that's being discussed here.
I'm not sure if you understand what makes passkeys phishing-resistant?
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.
I understand how passkeys work. You don't need the legitimate app's credentials, we're talking about phishing attacks, you're trying to bring the victim to giving you access/control to their account without them realizing that that's what is happening.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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'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.
How did the service authenticate the user in order to create the new credential within the attacker-controlled app?
With banks, typically a combination of your account number, pin and some confirmation code sent via email or SMS. And of course unregistering your previous device. Not sure where you're going with this though?
I understand how passkeys work. You don't need the legitimate app's credentials, we're talking about phishing attacks, you're trying to bring the victim to giving you access/control to their account without them realizing that that's what is happening.
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.
Correction: nothing prevents the attacker from using the app's legit package ID other than requiring the uninstall of the existing app.
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.
If the side loaded app does not have permission to use the passkeys and cannot somehow get the user to approve passkey access of the new app, that would be a good alternative to still allow custom apps.
I don't think you understand. This exists _today_, regardless of how you install apps, because attackers can't spoof app signatures. If I don't have Bank of America's private signing key, I cannot make an app that requests passkeys for bankofamerica.com, because bankofamerica.com publishes a file [0] that says "only apps signed with this key fingerprint are allowed to request passkeys for bankofamerica.com" and Android's credential service checks that file.
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
I like the idea of requiring extra work to get notification access. But really what all these scams pray on are time sensitivity, take that away and you solve the problem in many ways. For example, your bank shouldn't let you drain your account without either being in person or having a mandatory 24hr waiting period. Same could be done with side loaded apps getting notifications, if it's side loaded and wants to read notifications, then it needs to wait 24 hrs. Mostly it won't ever matter.
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.
>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."
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.
How would that solve scammer-driven installs? The scammer is not in a rush, they already have the victim listening and following their instructions.
> community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."
You can also cut yourself with a kitchen knife but nobody proposes banning kitchen knives. Google and the state are not your nannies.
>You can also cut yourself with a kitchen knife but nobody proposes banning kitchen knives.
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)
In this example we still don't require you to register with anyone to buy a knife, get the blessing of some institution to sell knives, or, as in this case, get a certification before you can start making knives.
its crazy that different things, like knives and app stores, have different rules. maybe thats why the quip about the knife sounded super cool but fell apart as an analogy for this scenario when thought about 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.
I think it's important to consider the intent of those laws, too. They are primarily or even exclusively to prevent you from hurting others with knives. They are not really intended to protect you from cutting yourself in your own home. So I think the parent's comment still holds weight.
All of these rules, and yet people still cut themselves and others.
you cant buy a kitchen knife that is too long
What?
sorry, should say "carry", not "buy". most states have a maximum length you can carry (4-5.5 inches is common).
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.
You still have an hour or two to edit your comment. Look in that line of text where you see your user name, click “Edit”.
Doesn’t editing require a karma threshold?
it does not (thankfully!)
Apostrophe's don't have a karma threshold, either. ;-)
As kevin_thibedeau points out elsewhere in the thread, he's not necessarily wrong. In many states and foreign countries it's illegal to carry a large knife in public without a reason and I'm sure purchases are restricted in some places as well. Most people are more or less OK with that, it seems, so there historically hasn't been a lot of pushback.
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...
Long knives in the UK are like full auto guns in the rest of the world.
> In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...
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.
the whack-a-mole problem is real but mandatory registration doesn't actually fix it for sophisticated actors -- they'll just use burner entities or buy aged developer accounts. it mostly raises costs for hobbyists and side projects. the permission-gating approach dfabulich mentions (require registration only for notification/SMS interception APIs) seems more targeted.
I have a radical solution - it should not be possible to contact someone unsolicited.
All phone calls, SMS, emails, and instant messages should be blocked unless the other party is in my contacts or I have reached out to them first (plus opt-in contact from contacts of contacts, etc). Ideally, cryptographically verified.
I would argue this is the real solution to spam and scamming - why on earth are random people allowed to contact me without my consent? Phone numbers or email addresses being all you need to contact me should be an artifact of an earlier time, just like treating social security numbers as secret.
I realize this isn't super practical to transition existing systems to (though spam warnings on email and calls helps, I suppose, and maybe it could be made opt-in). I dearly hope the next major form of communication works this way, and we eventually leave behind the old methods.
Also, SMS shouldn't be used for 2FA anyway.
>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...?
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.
I wonder if putting this choice on the user would be most appropriate?
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.
That attack vector is just a symptom. It’s unfathomably foolish to use two-factor authentication via something as easy to intercept as SMS. Two-factor authentication should be done using a separate hardware token that generates time-based one-time codes. Anything else is basically security theater.
One time codes are still vulnerable to phishing by a site that proxies the bank's authentication challenge. You need something like FIDO2 where a challenge-response only works when the relying party ID is correct.
The main problem here is the banks relying on an untrusted device as second factor.
Only immutable devices should be allowed as second factor.
There will _always_ be a need to balance between safety and the cost of adding more safety. There is no point at which safety is complete; there is always more that can be done, but the cost gets higher and higher.
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"
How about.
"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.
> 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.
The new "Terminal" app might eventually evolve into something like that.
This mode already exists. It's called "Install LineageOS".
> I think the community needs a better response to this problem than "nuh uh, everything's fine as it is."
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.
> the malware captures their two-factor authentication codes
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.
Codes arrive via SMS, which is available to all apps with the READ_SMS permission. This isn't an OS vuln. It is a property of the fact that SMS messages are delivered to a phone number and not an app.
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 require Developer Registration for apps with READ_SMS then.
If they restricted sideloaded apps from sniffing SMS then I wouldn't mind all that much.
So no access to SMS for apps distributed on F-Droid?
I think there's room to raise the bar of required tech competency without registration.
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.
Maybe we should take away peoples' phone calls, ability to use knives, walking on the street, swimming in water, drinking liquids of any kinds, alcohol, trains, while we are at it.
I don’t want to be too flippant, but I think there is a real trade off across many aspects of life between “freedom” and “safety”.
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).
> In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector.
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.
Google's announcement is just trolling, there's an order of magnitude more scams on the Play store and they don't call for its closure.
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?
> 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.
Agree with this middle path you point out. On one hand, I do not want some apps to be distributed anonymously, I need to know who is behind it in order to trust the app. On the other hand, many apps are benign.
Permissions are a great way to distinguish.
Do you need Google to compel the author to start a business relationship with them, which they can cut off at any time?
Or would you be OK knowing that Thunderbird you downloaded from https://thunderbird.net/ is signed by the thunderbird.net certificate owner?
Typo squatting is a thing, and so are Unicode homographs.
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.
Something like Thunderbird might be an exception, but also domain confusion exists, so in the general case, most likely not because most users are susceptible to this.
should I be confident that thunderbird.net is the real one, or could it be hosted at thunderbird.org, thunderbird.com, or thunderbird.mozilla.org?
> standard security warnings
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.
> but I think the community needs a better response
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.
These people would try to ban talking if the scams moved to in-person conversations. At some point individual responsibility has to come into play.
You can’t even win with adding more scare screens because as soon as Epic isn’t allowed to bypass the scare screens, they’ll sue you.
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...
I agree with Epic. It should be like on windows or macOS where you can register, get notarized, and then distribute without scare screens. I don’t see why phones are inherently different than computers.
The problem with mandatory developer registration, is that it gives Google and Governments the ability to veto apps.
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.
> The problem with mandatory developer registration, is that it gives Google and Governments the ability to veto apps.
Don't they already have that power?
You can download any APK you like on the internet and run it without google/gov getting in the way
Yes, but the already have the power to ban apps if they wanted to. They just don't. That's the point.
No judgement whatsoever, but for almost everyone they too will think, no big deal you only install software through stores right? Nothing changes for them, in fact they can't conceive of an alternative anymore.
That's true.
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.
No, that is one reason why they are pushing for these changes.
It's worse than that. Google will be able to track who's using a particular app because it has to be installed the official way. This means for example that anyone who has installed an ICE Tracking app will be reported to the government and perhaps added to a terrorist list.
No you can still install APKs offline but they have to be signed (likely enforced by Google Play Services). Not to mention you can still install unisgned APKs like before with adb. Which doesn't make this any better of course.
The judge told Google that Apple is not anti-competitive because Apple has no competitors on it's platform (this all stemming from the Epic lawsuits).
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.
Like many things in the US, this should be settled by congress not judges.
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.
"Like many things in the US, this should be settled by congress"
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.
Sorry, which exact ruling are you referring to? How did the court arrived at this finding (that seems irrelevant, false)?
There were parallel anti-competitive behavior cases brought against Apple and Google.
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.
It is a non-sensical ruling. But IIRC the reason was basically that while Apple and Google did basically the same shit, only Google kept a written record of their monopolistic behaviour, so only Google was found guilty.
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.
Registration just creates friction for legitimate developers (thousands) while bad actors simply rotate shell companies and fake/stolen IDs.
This conflates identity verification with criminal deterrence, they're not the same thing.
The thing that everyone here ignores is that the friction isn't just for safety. It's by design. For some reason, everyone is giving Google as much benefit of the doubt as possible. But no, they want to drive out small developers in general, and this is just one piece of the puzzle. Google has already put up unrelated barriers to publishing apps on Google Play, required every app developer to dox themselves to every user (meanwhile Apple is far more permissive and allows an opt-out for non-commercial apps), they downrank apps by small developers, use alternate UX that disincentivizes installing lesser known apps, put up big scary warnings like "This app isn't installed often" or "Fewer people engage with this app" on the pages of those apps. The only explanation is that they want more money and less upkeep and moderation with the pesky small developers, and the real money-makers are the big corporate apps. They're recreating "the rich get richer" in their microcosm.
Friction does matter. Yes, criminals will create fake accounts with stolen IDs and stolen credit cards. But creating 1,000s of these is hard. Creating polymorphic banking trojans is simple.
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.
If you can convince someone over the phone to install malware thru a million "don't do this" screens, you can convince them to just give you their login credentials. Which is both easier, cheaper, and, I imagine, more effective.
Yeah, Google is terrible at validating developers are non-malicious on google play. plenty of fake/malicious/garbage apps make it through the filter.
Banning apps installation outside PlayStore will be a disaster for power-ish users and will start a fight between Google and community. I abandoned rooting my devices because I could achieve all I wanted through apps (mostly ad- and nag-freedom, it's impossible to be online without ad blocking). But all these were downloaded as APKs. I cannot imagine how the first day without these will be.
"Don't be evil" → "Don't be evil without registering first and uploading your government ID."
The most telling detail is the sequencing. Google spent years in court arguing Android is open to fend off antitrust regulators, won key battles on that basis, and is now quietly closing the door they swore under oath was permanently propped open. The antitrust defense was the product roadmap's cover story. And framing this as security is particularly rich from the company whose own Play Store routinely hosts malware that passes their review. The problem they're solving isn't "unverified developers distribute harmful apps" — it's "unverified developers distribute apps we can't monetize or control."
To be honest, if both Android and iOS were walled gardens, I'd choose iOS every time. I choose Android specifically because of its openness. But if that weren't the case, I'd prefer the smoother UX and stronger Apple ecosystem.
You're welcome to it I suppose. As someone forced to use iOS for the past year I'm still waiting to find any smooth UX or strong ecosystem...
The undersigned are basically a list of entities Google would like to see disappear.
Precisely! Google doesn't care one bit about civil society; it cares about power to itself even if this means punching freedom and liberty in the face. Personally I think it'll be a good thing if this restriction finally wakes up people to seek alternatives to Google.
If I'm being honest, I suspect this
> 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.
I think we're about to see an explosion in "mini apps". It's taken 10+ years for us to catch up to WeChat and China but this regulation and other issues are going to block a lot of innovation and we're better off surfacing tiny PWA or SPA like apps that get loaded in native apps or we just do away with that entirely. The time has come.
Elon's vision for the X "everything" app. It's great for them, now every single thing you do has the full gamut of privacy permissions. Playing a "mini-game"? Full accurate GPS coordinates available to it because you also have the ride-hailing "mini-app".
Isn't the obvious solution to use an AOSP fork that does not have to comply with the registration requirements? Distributions like Graphene and Lineage are completely unaffected.
Google are also destroying that path by delaying the releases more and more.
Even more reason to use these forks (and support them), right?
No bank in my country has an app that works with those, so it's not an option for me anymore.
Have yoz really checked for GrapheneOS? Which country?
Is using a cheap Android device (the cheapest Android phones are less than $100 on Amazon) an option? The idea is to use that phone for 2FA or whatever is app is necessary for, and use a degoogled device for your other day-to-day activities. It's not ideal because you need to spend some extra money, but it buys you a lot of privacy.
Does the web app for the bank actually selectively block mobile phones? I just checked and Chase here in the US lets me log in on Brave Mobile on iOS. Perhaps your bank lets you log on in the browser.
My understanding (I'm in the US too) is that apps in many other countries don't even have a web app equivalent. If you want your money, you need an authentic android phone and a closed-source app. Or, you can buy a plane ticket somewhere else.
Most banking in for example Europe work fine with GrapheneOS, as long as you relock the bootloader. See e.g.: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
No, because many apps refuse to run on third-party distros due to misguided notions of them being insecure. It's easy to say "just don't use those apps" but in reality, people are rightly unwilling to put up with any friction and so will simply continue to use Google's version of the OS.
Many banking apps work as long as you relock the bootloader. E.g. on GrapheneOS:
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Many people online and in person telling me "Google backed down" or "Google has an advanced flow" are typically referring to these two statements from Google staff:
> 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
[2] - https://wrong.host.badssl.com/
why anyone thinks "open letters" and petitions to a trillion-dollar company will get them to change their mind is beyond me
It matters to me because I'm reading it now and feel more informed about this problem. Throwing the towel in and saying it's all pointless isn't helpful.
It's not throwing in the towel, it's about doing things that we the people can actually do.
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.
We can also do both, right? :)
Because the company either has to address it, or stop pretending it's "listening to concerns" or whatever. Even if it doesn't change the outcome, it makes it clearer that the company is engaging in bad faith.
It's something apps that will soon break can point their users to so they know to blame Google and a bunch of incompetent governments.
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.
Would rather a more robust and distributed app store system that figures out how to police these edge cases of fraud rather than one vendor (Apple or Google) whose monopolies push developers into subscriptionware across the board. Something more akin to how internic moved from one domain name registrar to what we have today, chock full of competition and new top level domains.
It feels like independent development on devices has slowed in recent years. More stores appealing to different developer models/tools and monetization strategies please.
Wrong approach. Vote with your wallet instead. My next mobile phone will not have OS from Google (not from Apple).
Something like 7 iOS phones are sold every second of the day and there are even more Android phones sold. The number of people who care about this issue is far too few for any kind of boycott to be noticed by the handset makers. The only option is to appeal to Google's sense of what's right.
In the time it took you to read this comment, 200 phones were sold.
Highly technically knowledgeable people are more influential in this sphere than the average consumer. If developers hate your device and love your competitor, that's a real problem.
It's not clear to me what the net outcome is.
I've mostly owned Android devices but for my family I've always recommended iOS devices because they are more locked down.
It's emphatically not "the wrong approach," and it's exceedingly weird when everyone makes things like this an "either/or."
Do BOTH, when possible.
I would if there was a viable mobile phone OS I could switch to. iOS isn't any better. Linux phones, sadly, aren't very practical for daily use. AOSP based projects also have many limitations, and are still dependent on Google.
What phone are you considering? Sailfish still doesn't seem very successful and mobile Linux barely boots on anything that performs better than a fifteen year old budget device.
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.
Fairphone 6 with /e/OS for example.
Oh yes, let me an individual out vote a trillion dollar corporation. That will surely work this time!
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).
Good luck with that.
No luck needed.
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]
[0] http://furilabs.com/
[1] https://murena.com/america/products/smartphones/
> > Good luck with that.
> 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.
My condolences, that sucks that you’re stuck in such an authoritarian country. If you look at the PostmarketOS site, you may be able to find a legal phone (weird to type that phrase) that can be reflashed. Or you could buy one while on vacation, my guess is they don’t check models at the border if it looks like a personal device.
Illegal in Brazil per the Digital Child and Adolescent Statute. Operating systems are legally required to provide age verification functionality in a manner approved by the government.
Do they do inspections?
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).
Indeed, and since Brazil now has mandatory age checking in the OS, it's illegal to own or operate such phones in the country, thus they will never be certified by ANATEL.
Works for me.
Just here to register my disapproval of this, and to remind everyone that you should support Linux phones if you’re against it. Or Graphene OS, at the very least, even though this still supports Google due to the requirement for a Pixel phone.
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!
When do we think PWA and WebRTC will be attacked and degraded as insecure?
Does anyone know if this will affect Lineage OS with root?
As far as I know, it's implemented in the proprietary part of Android (Google Mobile Services, GMS), so it won't affect LineageOS users as long as they don't install the GMS.
If I may advocate for the non HN partisan position here.
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.
For me this change is a problem not just because of the ID upload to Google but mainly because it's another nail in the coffin of native software solutions. It increases friction and anything that increases friction is bad.
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.
Did your users really consider your app if it wasn't in the Play Store?
I personally see an unmoderated app store as more detrimental to the end users. The harm happens at scale.
That's the status quo, though. Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store are essentially unmoderated. The sheer scale of them and both platforms' technical architectures prohibits either company from properly validating their stores' contents - they can't even catch the easy cases, like all the apps that impersonate ChatGPT. The main thing they manage to do is inconvenience innocent indie devs once in a while.
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.
Why do you expect another app store to be different? At what scales do the dynamics of what you have described change?
When there were many different app stores to choose from, nobody would be forced to use an unmoderated app store. What happened to individual freedom and responsibility?
I would need to see a widely used and trusted 3rd party store before leaving Google Play became a consideration. I'm interested, but not an early adopter. It's also unclear if any store that reaches this point doesn't institute similar moderation techniques. Scale incentivizes bad actors, which in turn requires good moderation.
Uh, is having Aurora Store as a signatory a good idea? It's literally a Google Play Store bypassing tool.
The real issue is that mandatory registration doesn't actually stop scammers. It stops hobbyist developers and small open source projects.
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.
The permission problem also affects normal apps. Things like KDE Connect quickly become useless without advanced permissions, for instance.
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).
Dear Undersigned,
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.
Sure thing, as long as it doesn't require any permissions. I have installed multiple apks on my phone from unknown people. Note that Google's requirement is also for completely permissionless apps like games.
If I want to run a piece of software on my phone, I shouldn't need to go ask google whether they're cool with it
Nice strawman. People want the ability to decide for themselves whether or not to install some APK, they are not saying every APK under the sun is trustworthy.
It is a simplification, not a strawman.
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.
> 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
Android already tells users when they're installing software from outside the Play Store and shows big scary warnings if Play Protect is turned off. What else do you want? If I want to install something from Sketchy McMalwareson after all that, that's my phone and my business.
sure, point me to the fdroid page for it
No.
Side loading is an interesting hobby horse for hackers. It causes material harm to a lot of people. But hackers want to keep it anyway for themselves for ideological and aesthetic reasons.
Who says that Google is the one to decide what open source software I can install on my mobile Android computing device?
Wym? Google says it’s the one to decide. They are doing this because side loading causes fraud. There is pressure and lobbying (like this open letter) to stop them from locking it down.
It was a catchy rethorical question. Desired emphasis on the fact that a smartphone is a computing device.
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.
Ideological is carrying a lot of weight there. Perhaps you can be more specific about the ideological arguments you are hearing that are not worth it?
Walled gardens have less fraud and malware because it's less open. But developers prefer open source decentralized software. Of course, we are technologically literate enough to avoid the fraud. It's similar to drug decriminalization or the legalization of sports gambling.
Citation please; and remember your answer is incomplete without a comparison to the safety of NON sideloaded apps.
Okay, then every book, every email, every text message, every comment, and every letter should be signed by a third party that's verified your ID. After all, there's speech which can cause material harm and free speech is just an ideological thing. It'd be dangerous if we allowed unsigned messages to be sent between people.