Google’s grip on Android keeps tightening. In what will certainly be another step that we will look back upon as just another nail in the coffin, Google is going to require every Android developer to register with Google, even if they don’t publish anything in the Play Store. In other words, even if you develop Android applications ad only make them available through F-Droid or GitHub, you’ll still have to register with Google and hand over a bunch of personal information and a small fee of $25. Google is effectively recreating Apple’s Gatekeeper for macOS, but on Android.
It won’t come as a surprise to you that Google is doing this in the name of security and protecting users. The company claims that its own analysis found “over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play”, and the main reason is that malware developers can hide behind anonymity. As such, Google’s solution is to simply deanonymise every single Android developer.
Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users on certified Android devices. This creates crucial accountability, making it much harder for malicious actors to quickly distribute another harmful app after we take the first one down. Think of it like an ID check at the airport, which confirms a traveler’s identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags; we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from. This change will start in a few select countries specifically impacted by these forms of fraudulent app scams, often from repeat perpetrators.
↫ Suzanne Frey at the Android Developer Blog
This new policy will only apply to “certified Android devices”, which means Android devices that ship with Google Play Services and all related Google stuff preinstalled. How this policy will affect devices running de-Googled Android ROMs like GrapheneOS where the user has opted to install the Play Store and Google Play Services is unclear. Google does claim the personal information you hand over as part of your registration will remain entirely private and not be shown to anyone, but that’s not going to reassure anyone.
To its small credit, Google intends to create an Android Developer Console explicitly for developers who only operate outside of the Play Store, and a special workflow for students and hobbyists that waives the $25 fee. First tests will start in October of this year, with an official rollout in a number of countries later in 2026, which will then expand to cover the whole world. The first countries seeing the official rollout will be countries hit especially hard by scams (according to Google’s research, at least): Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.
Google has been trying to claw back control over Android for years now, and it seems the pace is accelerating lately. None of these steps should surprise you, but they should highlight just how crucially important it is that we somehow managed to come to a viable third way, something not controlled by either Apple or Google.
PostmarketOS or one of the other Linux phone distros is well positioned to take that third slot… if they can nail the usability angle.
I think the marketing message of Linux smartphones is really bad. We are becoming too comfortable with the idea of end user devices being flawless magic boxes controlled by tiny little fairies in the wonderful world of cloud.
Linux phones should be seen as pocket computers that make phone calls, to convey the message that it is a powerful tool and you can get yourself shot in the foot. A few decades ago, even my mother could replace the fuses or check the oil level of her car, and anyone could take a photo with a manual focus camera during family holidays. Grandpa would hand over a rangefinder and explain “hey, the image must overlap in the center, turn this wheel if necessary” and “arrow to the left, too dark; arrow to the right, too bright”, and done.
Honestly, I have zero issues with the Librem 5 as daily driver, but I must remind myself that it is a computer. If I forget handbrake running in the background converting a video, I will get out of home and be out of battery in 30 minutes. Nothing will eject a resource-consuming application because the phone is not the judge of whether you want to be running that application or not. So you won’t see 45 “open” applications like you see on smartphones sometimes.
This is how control is being taken from us not only of our digital lives, but everything. They make us dumb and unable to operate anything on our own. They make us unable to think. So people start trusting the magic box with all their data and their lives (and all the scams with all the personal data floating around) and have terrorized thoughts out of the idea of having to navigate the world without them.
It’s what I always tell people: would you go around posting pictures of your newborn with your home address written on the back? No? So then why you post them online? All geotagged photos have your location in the EXIF data, just like turning a printed picture around.
So, really, the usability is fine. And, actually, even better, at least when it comes to phosh. You get real 3D buttons that you know are clicable and there are not 3248324 settings in the settings screen, endlessly scrolling. If you ever need anything more advanced, you go to the terminal and find the conf file.
The camera still sucks, that’s true, but other than that? Calendar works, Waydroid works, the battery life is fine (unless you watch 5h of cat videos on the go every day), calling works, SMS works, data works, tethering works, DAV sync works, browsing works (even better than on an iphone tbh), it’s just fine. When I hand over my Librem 5 to people, most think I installed a cool Android skin.
In my mind, the ideal mobile device is somewhere in the middle between what you describe and a regular Android phone. The freedom of full Linux, but tuned for mobile use. One could almost get there with AOSP in the past, but Google is taking that away from us in various ways. By law they have to keep the kernel open source, but they can close up everything in the user space as they see fit since they own it. Likewise, the hardware manufacturers are under no obligation to open source their drivers; they have to provide hooks to the kernel so the phone works as a whole device, but that’s it.
So let’s go the opposite direction: A true Linux based mobile operating system that is fine tuned for specific devices to have things like sleep and wake timers, aggressive battery and memory management, background process management tuned for on-the-go situations, better Wi-Fi and cellular data handoff, etc. Ironically the main issue is there is no major company with near-unlimited funding to throw at the problem, so it will never truly be solved. I absolutely hate that, but it’s the way the world works. In a tech utopia, we’d have a community of open source developers and hardware manufacturers working together to make it happen, profits be damned, but sadly that will never happen.
Morgan,
I think many companies have the resources to do it. But the market hasn’t rewarded those that do. Hypothetically if iphone and android were magically killed off, new platforms would crop up to fill the void. But the duopoly is too strong and all would-be competitors to iphone/android have died off. Given this reality, it doesn’t make much financial sense to invest money to compete in a market against incumbents that are too strong to displace.
I feel the same way.
Going with real FOSS saves development costs for everyone involved, from the hardware manufacturers and the entire stack on top. FOSS brings in so many tangible benefits. It can improve compatibility, helps eliminate duplication of effort, offloads long term support to the community. The utopia for technology is FOSS.
Greed can turn all of these benefits into cons though. Even companies that benefited from open source code on their way up, including apple and google, can face perverse incentives to close the door behind themselves and alienate the open source model once they are dominant,
> A true Linux based mobile operating system that is fine tuned for specific devices to have things like sleep and wake timers, aggressive battery and memory management, background process management tuned for on-the-go situations, better Wi-Fi and cellular data handoff, etc. Ironically the main issue is there is no major company with near-unlimited funding to throw at the problem, so it will never truly be solved.
Google already did. Android is open source. Any company interested on a full featured capable and so on phone has ninety something percent of the job done for them… And with android apps compatibility.
It seems you haven’t been paying attention. Google is taking steps — including the subject of this article — to close up as much of Android as they legally can. The end goal for Google is to have only the kernel itself open source, which is not enough for a small team or lone developer to build a full mobile operating system.
AOSP is now broken, intentionally, by Google. They are refusing to release device tree code which hobbles development on their own Pixel devices. Open source Android images like those published by LineageOS and GrapheneOS rely on the device tree code to provide full hardware functionality. AOSP without drivers and hardware support is not a complete and usable operating system.
zram works fine as far as memory management goes, and I think it is ok that the applications do not auto-stop for memory management, or any other kind of background process management – this would require developers to rework everything instead of the current situation of every ARM linux application be potentially ok in my librem 5. Which is to my point, we should resume treating our devices like the tools they are instead of magic toys. Finish using an application? Close it.
When I had an ipad, I used to get upset when an application got ejected – it was usually not the want I’d be ok with it being ejected and sometimes it would not resume the state properly. It would be elsewhere or even back to its initial screen.
The biggest problem is the web. As long as I am using normal applications, the battery life is fine, the phone is not hot. Open a web browser? RAM usage goes through the roof, the phone gets warm, anti-AI challenges start eating CPU. It is a royal pain, only helped by a careful selection of scripts. Waydroid integration is excellent and your Waydroid applications will auto-close when memory pressure increases – Waydroid can see the system resources and it is talking directly to the running kernel on the Librem 5. It is not a VM (you probably know that).
Wi-Fi cellular handoff has never been a problem in my experience.
The experience is better and better and the Librem 5 is a much better device than it was 2 years ago when I started daily-driving it. Even the battery life is longer despite a much older battery now. 3GB of RAM, in a normal world, should have been fine, but the web truly sucks.
With real competition, we would for sure see a Linux mobile device happen. Alas, everything now is a monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly. And the trend of using Android or iOS only applications and mechanisms on a official scale worries me a lot. Why should I be forced to own a device I don’t want to have to access public services?
Linux is DOA as long as governments and banks require a locked-down OS via hardware attestation. Most people don’t want to use two phones and eventually more and more stuff will get locked down with hardware attestation until all computing devices will only run approved software
Here you can leave your thouhgs to google:
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification
Summer of 2025 is when we lost the Internet… UK Age verification, EU chat control is incoming, EU CSA (which phone makers comply with by locking down the bootloader), and now this.
It was fun. Time to go in resistance mode.
Serafean,
I’ve had arguments with people who feel that the restrictions don’t matter because they aren’t 100% effective and hackers can break out. But I feel the problem is much bigger than that. The open community can’t survive under restrictions that cut out the user base. For a movement to be successful, numbers are important. Unfortunately when tech companies succeed at making it difficult to use open alternatives, those alternatives tend to die.
I know small fractions of the market will keep on resisting, but the restrictions are nevertheless going to contribute to our open islands shrinking and becoming harder to reach. I hate to be so pessimistic about it, but I don’t know how we stop the erosion of our freedoms especially when the people who actively stand up for them are a tiny minority.
It is truly bizarre how must people will just… let it be.
A few friends of mine are way more progressive and to the left than I am and yet they find me weird for not having whatsapp (when the whole country operates on it) and spend way too much time on facebook and instagram.
Why do you do it, I ask. The answer always is because some auntie is there or because we are doomed anyway, so why bother.
It irritates me deeply. I don’t use any of that, daily drive a Librem 5 and my main OS is FreeBSD, and, honestly… I don’t miss anything, I still talk to people, kept all my friends and even made new ones, communicate online and for the exceptional case (like my scanner or my bank MFA application), I load Waydroid or Windows.
Like, really… people are so deeply addicted to all the BS big tech produces that they can’t stop using it even if they are ill and the whole society is the way it is.
I don’t think you understand what I mean: the time to fold up shop trying to make the world a better place, and create an island of our own is almost here.
Run our own mail servers, XMPP servers, mastodon, pay cash, when in a bank wave around the Librem5 (or pinephone, or whatever else sprouts into existence) and tell them their 2FA methods don’t work (don’t accomodate them using waydroid).
It will be inconvenient, it will suck.
Indeed.
I pick my fights, due to time constrains. I am actually going to get a lawyer to have a chat with my phone company. Their self-service portal does not open when you are abroad (at least not in the country I am at the moment), so I had to connect to VPN to purchase a data roaming package (luckily I run my own VPN server). Not only that… I was trying to contact support and their chat is now 100% operated by an AI chatbot so, to talk to a human, you need to have twitter, facebook or whatsapp – which I don’t.
On top of that, a few years ago, they charged me 100 EUR for being a foreigner, even though I’ve had a 100 EUR/month contract with them for the prior TEN years.
They are truly pathetic.
So, with the bank, they started pestering me to upgrade the MFA application, which I did – but then it detected my rooted waydroid installation and blocked me out. I called their helpdesk, told them to arrange for me a hardware token. They said “ok, you can keep running the old version”, and I even stopped receiving SMS alerting me to upgrade. So I consider that a win.
Now even in my circle, even though I offer everyone my 72TB of storage, all backed up off-site, and even though I offer everyone the chance to host their email, only two of my closest friends took the offer. One of them even hosts his eshop with me (he manufactures musical instrument accessories). Now he wouldn’t pick the whatsapp fight. He is a teacher at a local public school and the whole district coordinates absolutely everything via whatsapp. I told him that nowhere in the laws and statutes it is stated that a civil servant must have whatsapp, but he said he’d rather have his colleagues like him.
I went the way of inconvenience and, honestly, I have way more free time and I am way happier. I don’t talk so much to the people who didn’t come to Signal but we are still friends. A friend of mine even reverted to sending letters a couple of times per year. I hardly ever watch youtube anymore and the internet is now limited to 3-4 websites and 3 forums. Another friend collects DVDs and blu-rays since we were teenagers and I can always borrow something to watch and I sleep much better now that I don’t binge watch crap. Oh, and I also spend less money because I am less bombarded by ads about the newest coolest greatest disposable tech toy.
Shiunbird,
It’s quite a catch-22. Unable to buy more data when you’ve run out of data. Ironic that you have to find a local hot spot just to buy data.
Tmobile? I faced this exact same problem with them. No human support options. I guess somebody thought using social media would eliminate support staff. I (along with many many others with the same idea) had problems with their email to text gateway blocking alerts to our own phones. Sending oneself mobile alters can be genuinely useful. The staff monitoring the forums were courteous and dutifully escalated everyone’s issues through their internal case system, but the responses for those experiencing my problem was usually the same: tmobile’s texting can’t be used reliably for email alerts and there’s nothing tmobile can do about it. There is no support for whitelisting messages to ourselves. Upon conclusion they would abruptly take down the posts because they’re on social media, haha.
Serafean,
Every one of those things you speak of in the hypothetical I already do and more. I’m afraid you’re right about the inconvenience. And because it’s in the tech companies’ interests to squash federation, boycotting their services often means you loose out on many friends and family connections who are on those services. Cutting connections with people wasn’t part of the goal (for me anyway), but it is a consequence of boycotting services over regressive terms. Companies know this, yet they’re not going to loose much sleep over it because they’ve got the user numbers and they can afford to ignore the marginalized.
It’s clear from google’s own blog that they were internally already aware of how bad this was for openness because they’ve preemptively put out PR spin to counter it.
No google, it’s disingenuous to call any of this “open”. This threatens to kill off what’s left of openness in the mainstream mobile market, even on 3rd party app stores. Google could be honest with a more self-serving “we believe in forced security over openness”.
Answering above: the carrier is O2.
They all suck, really.
This is draconian as hell, especially because android has been the platform of choice for those wanting freedom from notorious apple lock downs. Google moving significantly closer to apple is just a rotten outcome for consumer choice.
Let nobody here leave under the delusion that google’s decision to remove an owner’s right to run 3rd party software isn’t going to become abused by the rise in authoritarianism. Whether this is google’s intention or not is irrelevant. With google’s permission being required to installing software, even from independent sources and 3rd party app stores, then it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that it’s only a matter of time before the authoritarians will use it to control users. This absolutely will happen if google proceeds with this plan.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin are too smart to play dumb when it comes to authoritarianism. They don’t get the benefit of a “this was years ago and we didn’t know this could happen” excuse. No, they will have been personally complicit in surrendering our devices to fascism in exchange for google having more selfish control over android users and developers. They know where this leads and they don’t care because at the end of the day they’ll be richer for it. That’s the reality.
What dicks. It’s not about fees, but the death of our digital freedoms. The ability for future generations to run applications without needing anyone’s else’s permissions lies in the balance. We’re seriously loosing a lot of ground. IPhone is already restrictive, next is android, but it really won’t stop there. Macos is already uncomfortably close. Windows 8 tried this already, and though MS failed, they will try again. Orwell’s works weren’t supposed to be prophetic 🙁
Alfman,
I can understand this when Microsoft opened up the personal Xbox devices to “dev mode” and asked for a fee to verify. After all it was built as a walled garden (they too waived fees from students. I think I still have an account). It was an improvement over the previous option, where you’d buy a very expensive dev-kit and sign an NDA to never talk about it.
But Android? The open source platform that was supposed to give user more freedom? The platform where Play Store and related services are optional add-ons?
How does this even fit with AOSP? How will other device developers like Boox which provide excellent eInk tablets survive? Will they be forced to completely abandon the platform? OR completely give in and have Google control over them (plus extra “tax” for having GPlay pre-installed)?
I’m not sure this is a good move.
But of course “who would think of the children?”, “all in the name of security!”
It’s already happened. I saw a message from the author of one of the VPN applications that they had delisted their app from Google Play due to new rules – you still can get the apk from GitHub. Over time, we will probably see that it will be impossible to sideload them on some phones.
a_very_dumb_nickname,
Can you provide a link?
Sure https://github.com/2dust/v2rayNG/discussions/4586#discussioncomment-13154242
This is the end of Android as a general purpose computing platform. Certainly I am not going to continue to further develop any Android apps under these restrictions. The claimed reasons for introducing this don’t even make any sense.
Minuous,
I think they are aiming to target the “premium” market only. The Spotifies, the Adobes, and so on…
The lone developer who build a one hit wonder like “Flappy Bird”? They can still help with the “long tail”, but they now have to pay for the privilege.
Security? If you believe the *primary* motivation is security then I have a nice beach property on Venus to sell to you.
Got to keep that money rolling in to throw on the AI cash fire. I wonder how well this will play out in the EU, if it even gets that far.
Are they nuts? I hope for either regulating the shaite out of them or having alternative (KDE mobile?). The biggest issue is that TheBigTech & banks won’t support it – otherwise most users wouldn’t see much difference if they would have whatsapp/telegram/instagram/facebook/
wojtek,
But they can’t really have “whatsapp/telegram/instagram/facebook”, can they?
None of these service providers will write an alternative for KDE/Gnome/Firefox mobile. They even take their time to write one for Windows Mobile back in the day, and Microsoft used to be a really big player in the mobile operating system space.
This puts everyone at the mercy of big corp as you said.
In the “stupid cousin test” this is a fine thing for them to do – as long as you can turn it off. I really don’t have any problem with this as a default at all. macos does this already, and it’s fine. Can it be turned off?
I’m trying to follow the discussions on this.
Some are more worried about the Play Integrity API which makes APKs unable to run on non-Google Android systems. So even if you have CyanogenMod or some other fork, and install the GAPIs… the apps will refuse to work.
This would mean much less room for AOSP based distributions.
sukru,
Indeed, the problem is twofold:
1) Google have made it easier for publishers to block users of unofficial android forks (in the name of security).
2) And now google are requiring official android devices to block 3rd party software that hasn’t been authorized by google (in the name of security).
Google was already gutting AOSP, but both of these have moved android towards an even less open future.
Alfman,
Thinking about it… this feels like a “one two punch”. It is really concerning for the open source Android.
Can these “required” locks be turned off? If it’s a “required default” it’s fine – if it’s a required lock down, it’s not fine.
CaptainN-,
Google’s intention is for it to be mandatory on all official android hardware.
Note they already do this for developers in the Google app store…
…which I’m ok with. Their store, their rules. It is a problem that two companies control nearly the entire mobile market, but at least this was somewhat mitigated by android users and developers being able to go elsewhere without needing google’s permission. If you’ll recall, android users had to go through some warnings to enable sideloading. Upon explicitly opting to sideload, they could install 3rd party software without any kind of DRM or interference from google. This was a fair balance between securing those who don’t want to sideload and letting those who want to sideload do so.
Now this change is explicitly about software distribution outside of google’s app store. Without google’s permission, owners won’t be able to run the software regardless of how they try to install it.
Google doesn’t deserve a say over software over at competing app stores, it’s blatantly anti-competitive. but beyond this I worry how apple & google are building extremely robust censorship control levers into their respective platforms. Governments are praising it, but that’s not necessarily a good thing for us.
Taking the keys away from owners, which let’s be 100% clear is what this does, is extremely dangerous for democracy. Real democracy is about people having control over their governments, but what google are doing is giving governments control over the people. Google PR might claim it’s not the intention, but they’d be fucking stupid to deny owner restrictions leads to it.
Sorry for the language, I do not mean to take any of this out on you, it’s just that this is really bad and we need to speak up about the consequences of these actions. While it’s the same old “we’re adding restrictions to protect you” argument, the fight for owner rights takes a more urgent turn especially now in the face of what’s happening with authoritarianism. It’s an absolute disgrace that dominant tech companies are voluntarily building up the very software jails that would extend the power fascists have on our hardware. When google says “We believe this is how an open system should work”, everyone who cares about actual openness needs to call out google’s bullshit. That is not how openness works! Google are obviously aware that Android was the mobile platform of choice for those who sought openness, but with google working to pervert the meaning of “open” to exclude owner control, we’re going to end up with no mainstream phones being open going forward. Outside of niche alternatives, which are themselves discriminated against, all devs will need the permission of apple & google before users can install their software.
Alfman,
Google’s issue goes deeper than just openness.
They also compete with their own OEMs, which is never a good thing to do. (In contrast, Microsoft’s for example Surface line is more limited, and geared more towards “prestige” and setting a good benchmark)
How does this affect Google?
Everything they do for AOSP or even GApps are available to all competitors (Samsung, Asus, etc). So they have little way of differentiation in Pixel devices.
It goes further! Samsung for example at one point tried to entirely fork and take control of Android. That thread is always there.
Remember when Microsoft Windows got criticized for the way it managed 3rd party software (effectively nothing)? Well, that doesn’t sound so bad now, does it? Everyone kept pushing “package managers” on Linux/Unix. A central repository of all the software you could ever need/want curated and maintained by the OS project/vendor.
You all did this to yourselves and you deserve it.
Humans are blind at a distance, while ignoring/mocking those of us who can see clearly. Humans always have and always will make these mistakes and never learn. It’s certain.
tuaris,
Microsoft tried to make their app store a non-optional requirement in window 8 while simultaneously doing everything they could to push everyone off of the “legacy desktop”. This was so unpopular they had to role it back, but let’s not forget that a centralized app store was microsoft’s intention for the future of windows.
I don’t really know what you are talking about. So many of us have consistently opposed the centralization of power. I’m sure you can find comments speaking to since since 2007 when you registered on osnews. We’ve always been concerned over this. The problem isn’t that none of us has been speaking out against corporate control, but that corporations can ignore us anyway.
Alfman,
This is true for many products that has become “mainstream”.
They don’t need to cater to enthusiasts, hackers or power users anymore. The masses basically do not care as long as you give them a “good enough” product. And Windows is good enough for most people.
This only becomes a problem is your original population was your main money maker. But even then you can still milk their nostalgia, while seeking higher revenue from new target audiences.