[TGower]

It really seems like they are doing a lot to appease the tiny minority of us power users, adb load unaffected, one time toggle in settings to opt out, no change to alternative app stores as long as the apk was built by a verified developer. Crazy how harsh the sentiment is here, there are real people being harmed by scam apps intercepting sms one time codes and this will reduce the rate of that happening. It's not like we can't sideload anymore, though a lot of comments here seem to be implying otherwise.

[hnburnsy]

Because this is a glide path to what they really want, look at Apple and running unsigned apps on your Mac, how it started, simple right click, how is it going, near impossible.

[selectively]

How it started: almost everything is signed, even pirated apps

How it's going: almost everything is signed, even pirated apps.

????

[kcb]

Because the initial announcement included none of that... it wasn't addressed at all until the harsh sentiment.

[fc417fc802]

It still hasn't been addressed. They walked back half of their wholly unreasonable position in an attempt to legitimize the other half.

[TGower]

Then shouldn't we celebrate the victory, drop it, and move on?

[kcb]

Victory is my device and its OS working the same way it always worked and the way it worked when I bought it.

[TGower]

Just don't install the OS updates then.

[fc417fc802]

> intercepting sms one time codes

Crazy idea, maybe they shouldn't be using those then. Maybe they should use email? Or god forbid a TOTP app. Or perhaps webauthn via the platform provided authenticator.

They very clearly aren't behaving in good faith. That's why the harsh sentiment.

[brnt]

Those scam apps largely are installed from the Play store. Let them fix that first.

[TGower]

Really, there are apps that will intercept and exfiltrate your bank one time code sms that are just sitting on the play store? First I'm hearing of this, what's the name of one?

[xigoi]

Many of the most popular apps on the Play Store will monitor all activity on your device and send it to a for-profit company.

[microtonal]

The pre-installed privileged services will monitory all activity on your device and send it to a for-profit company.

[selectively]

Your post is an outright lie.

[circuit10]

But that "tiny minority" are the people developing apps, which all their other users use... if you drive away devs from wanting to develop on your platform that's not going to go well for you (of course, they may still be forced to develop for Android if they want a wide audience, but you're driving away hobbyists with new ideas)

[TGower]

I still don't get how they are driving away devs. It's super easy for us to click the setting. If I urgently need to test my app during the 24 hour waiting period, I can just adb it on my device.

Based on the reaction here, it's obvious I'm missing something here, but I just don't see any real reason devs are feeling like they are being driven away. It's hardly more of an inconvenience than enabling developer mode, and I feel like we all get why they hide the developer settings menu behind that.

[iggldiggl]

The other factor would be driving away potential users – even when giving away an app for free, some people might derive satisfaction from knowing that other people find it useful and are actually using it, too.