I feel like I would have agreed with Google had they just argued “This is our private store. We did all the work to build it. We control the rules. If you want to make the Epic Store apk, you can. Sideloading is an absolute possibility. No hacking needed.”
I would agree with that.
Instead they argued by Epic charging money without giving google a slice, it compromises users safety and the innovation of the platform.
Fuck
Off.
But apps outside of their store (such as fdroid) get constantly pinged for malware security scans, and android treats them as second class citizens in a lot of scenarios. It’s really frustrating to fight your phone on so many fronts just to use the apps you want.
Apple iOS users outside of the EU are familiar with this too.
For the curious, sideloading apps requires you to run a server on your computer, and refresh the signature on the app at least once a month. Because iOS automatically kills any apps with out-of-date signatures, only automatically refreshes signatures on official App Store apps, and doesn’t allow any signatures longer than 30 days.
Don’t you also need a developer license? So that’s like an additional $8/month subscription to sideload on iOS.
Or I could be wrong 🤷
Guys this is huge
ID/age verification for apps is being built so only google signed and integrity verified apps can run, that would prevent any age verified apps running on non-official android OS like graphene.
This will have to change when apps are coming from any random app store and can no longer use these google attestation services
If Google is sad, I’m happy
Yeah, Google became such a shitty company. Used to love them, now I’d like to see them fail.
They’re still cool! They have lots of cool things they’ve released over the past few years! Like… Um…
Uh…
Well shit.
Released? Yes.
Closed down again? Also yes.
no doubt china will be making a similar judgement for Tencent etc.
on what? there’s a gazillion chinese android app stores already, which makes chinese android phones need a ton more ram to compensate for all the update notification etc. services clogging up the backend
