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This story with restricting users is a similar one to Manifest V3 in Chromium.
But we don't have anything like FF as an alternative to go from Android. Especially considering banks require "certified OS".
I switched to a Linux smartphone because I've had enough of the duopoly.
I also switched banks so I can use my bank card as the 2FA device, similar to CAP. [0]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip_Authentication_Program
What if we collectively decide to use the web alternatives for banking?
We lose some convinience since they are generally desktop oriented, but they don't check who signed my kernel
Most banks worth their salt accept GrapheneOS.
DNB in Norway does for sure. Same for BankID , national electronic identity authorization provider. There are good programmers out there that know their stuff. Find a bank that has a hacker culture like DnB.
I remember that I chose them just by comparing uMatrix output between them and SpareBank - the other big player. DNB had no 3rd party trackers showing, while SpareBank had a lot.
I live in Thailand which is very mobile first and the main way to pay for things here is through your banking app, you scan a QR code, it fires up the app and you make a transfer.
The convenience is great but increasingly businesses now begin to offer this as the ONLY way to pay.
I keep telling people because I'm seeing it begin. This is how it happens, this is the endgame for freedom, democracy and life as you know it. Give the West 20-30 years, it will happen in some developing countries sooner.
They will require the approved app to buy and sell. Without it you will be outside the financial system, and maybe will starve.
They will require the approved app to only run on the approved operating system. You will have 2-3 options for the approved operating system but total surveillance will be a mandatory feature on all of them.
Finally, they will punish you for wrongthink when your surveilled device detects you writing or saying it.
As the world gets worse political leaders will become more authoritarian until one finally checks the last box on that list, and that's the end.
There will be no escape except for death.
All the pieces are coming into place. Every time you hear them talking about better security for XYZ you can see how it's one of the pieces on the board, being moved one square.
I don't think there is one guy who has this master plan I think it's the inevitable end state for surveillance capitalism that's as pervasive as ours.
I am an atheist, I think the Bible is all fairy tales, and yet the "Mark of the Beast" vibes I get from where the world is going are out of control. The mark on your hand or your forehead that will be required to buy or sell, that was what you'd be forced to accept once the Antichrist took over, or whatever. The 2,000 year old fairy tales were not wrong they are starting to set it up now, you carry the device in your hand, they will do it through payments and banking.
I don’t need a bank for my daily driver and I can have a backup phone. You can get fairly recent Android devices at a fraction of the cost of a new one.
And if you still can, use the website.
I also had enough. Switching to Linux pretty soon.
The alternative is older versions of Android, from before these hostile changes. The propaganda that it's "unsafe" is just that, propaganda. Perhaps Google will realise once enough of the population refuses to put on the noose.
Here's what I think Google should do: I really like the Work Profile feature. It essentially sandboxes Work from personal and it adds nice little briefcase badges to mark apps that are in the Work Profile.
Another solution might be to to add an optional Uncertified Profile that if turned on allows unregistered apps but sandboxes them and marks them with a "dangerous" badge. That might ensnare these trojans and malicious apps that pose as legit. That might be enough to scare grandma and let people who know what they are doing do what they want.
Although, frankly I'd just prefer google just made a "Secure Profile" to keep bank apps and other high-security apps away from everything else.
I don't do banking on my phone. I really don't understand why anyone would. If I can't get to my PC or laptop, I'm probably near an ATM. I've already given so much autonomy to Google/Alphabet/Apple, I won't give them access to my bank account.
What about GrapheneOS?
Again, technological measures against this kind of attacks on ownership rights fall short and are probably what conglomerates want since it keeps the tech people busy in a self-satisfying "fight" against the big corporation.
You need legislation.
This is the social solution. It's making users aware of the issue and pressuring them to not upgrade, and in the long run pressuring legislators to forbid such monopolistic practices if the average person dislikes it.
This.
You can have a popup, but it must have a call-to-action. Explain to users how to fight this.
Copying this here for those that want some specifics:
Some things to advocate for to counter the direction we've been going in.
1. Termination of WIPO Copyright Treaty (prerequisite for #2)
2. Repeal of DMCA. (primarily because of Section 1201)
3. Enact and enforce, Right to ownership, Right to repair laws.
4. Enforce antitrust laws. / Break up monopolies
It's open source... We don't need legislation; you are free to do whatever you want, and open source provides those freedoms. You just want it to be the way you want it instead of it being the way that benefits the most people.
This "fight" will always be lost, because the other side is 99% of the population and they want to stop scammers more than they want to enable you to publish software to a personal tracking device anonymously...
> This library is licensed under the GPLv3.
If the intention was to make it easier to spread the word, you've already failed.
Anyway, this whole library should have been a copy-pastable snippet for a dialog or toast (what's with the duplicate code?); the only value added is the translation, which most app devs already have a pipeline for.
The code part is so trivial that I suspect it doesn't even meet the legal bar for copyright protection in many jurisdictions.
> Anyway, this whole library should have been a copy-pastable snippet for a dialog or toast
People under-value copy-pasting. I'd rather copy/vendor a thousand lines of code (with license+credit intact) than add it as a dependency.
I'm working on a side project, and needed a CPIO library for Go. CPIO is a fixed thing, a good implementation is "done". U-root[1] has a really decent implementation, so I've vendored 2500+ lines of code, as otherwise I'd have to (indirectly) depend on almost 700.000. Great value.
Yeah this is very
npm i is-evenOP, I recommend switching to the LGPLv3. It ensures users remain in control over your part of the code while avoiding this type of reaction.
changed it to Apache V2.0 license
changed to Apache V2.0 license
A little bit overkill to use a dependency to just show a dialog. I agree that Google ia making Android less and less free with every new release, but show a damn dialog, no need to use this.
It's also pretty sloppily coded, with the same code repeated in both branches of the `if`...
https://github.com/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn/blob/master/libr...
Sounds right. Though may aid in spreading the practice if it accumulates stars, goes viral on places like this?
I think creation of this repo is more of a statement than creation of utility.
The library features localized warnings.
> Google has announced that, starting in 2026/2027, all apps on certified Android devices will require the developer to submit personal identity details directly to Google. Since the developers of this app do not agree to this requirement, this app will no longer work on certified Android devices after that time.
I don’t have any hope that this will sway Google, but at least the users are being warned.
Wouldn't it be nice if, in this time of feeding our IDs to the machine, there would be someone who would also offer some nice and easy way to identify ourselves digitally? Maybe someone who sits on all that unverified advertisement tracking data already and somebody who has an AI agent to feed?
I'm sure everybody would profit from that...
https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
Fascinating that the same company producing zero knowledge proof implementation didn't think to use it for the purpose they mention here. Do these departments not talk to each other?
Based.
I wonder how badly Google's shenanigans will affect sales of new Android devices too. I've been looking to buy a foldable at some point, but I'll have to make entirely sure it won't be of an effectively broken (too new) Android version.
I doubt then locking down side loading will make more than 1% difference. Most people just don't care.
Well what is the alternative? Apple does the very same, even in the EU.
GPLv3 seems like a quite restrictive license for such a project. I would assume they want that note to be spread everywhere and while about user's freedom, the freedom for that code may be less relevant.
changed to Apache V2.0 license
Nice timing. I’d probably just ship a simple in-app dialog instead of a whole dep, but the message matters. For non-root users, will ADB + “Unknown sources” remain the escape hatch once the new checks roll out?
You don't need this library, it's just an `AlertDialog` wrapper with a check in `SharedPreferences`. It's not particularly well-written.
If this library is licensed under GPL, you can't really use it without relicensing your entire project, right?
changed to Apache V2.0 license
What would be my options as an end user who does not want to root his device
Google Pixel + GrapheneOS
If you want to know if your Banking App is compatible: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
Perhaps a Fairphone 6 with /e/OS (which is a de-googled Android)?
https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-s...
who does not want to root his device
Why not? Freedom isn't a given --- you need to fight for it.
Didn't Google say that they're gonna provide an escape hatch for students and hobbyists? So, best case scenario, we just need to tap some label 5 times to enable side-loading again.
google seem to have the multi-pronged attack on android devs going on atm. They are seemingly trying to take down as many apps and dev accounts as possible.. Anyone know why?
1. doxx yourself of they kill your account
2. re-build every app with pointless newer api version literally every year or it gets taken down.
3. Push an update or a new app or they kill your account.
..
My guess is enshittification, some random exec is trying to save a few pennies in server and storage costs.
..
I'd also say that google makes so much money from ads and data-brokering that everything else they do is not vital for their survival and thus undergoes a sort of "genetic drift" where they just make random decisions.
All this has me wondering: what's the future of chroot-based tools like proot-distro? No app store here, just PPAs. Can largely run whatever the hell I want, provided it's distributed for the OS I'm currently running.
Rad. That's the way to do it.
"Avoid Google. Don't buy Google products, especially their phones."
Money is the corporate language, especially for Big Tech, which is always several steps ahead of legislation.
> Add the JitPack repository to your root build.gradle
How much MB (kb?) does this dependency add to apk?
"Copyright GPL"
I don't think this meets the bar for copyrightable code. Copyright protects creative expression. Displaying a single dialogue does not take creative expression, and pretty much any developer given the task would produce code identical to this.