Android’s openness is under threat as Google requires developer verification for sideloading, putting F-Droid and digital sovereignty at risk. This video shows exactly how to take action through the KeepAndroidOpen.org initiative—whether you’re a developer, consumer, or concerned citizen. Here’s what to do to maintain Android’s open ecosystem before it’s too late.
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Can we please get to a point where we do not use the propaganda word “sideloading” and instead call it what it is: Installing software on your device.
Installing F-Droid and installing software from there is not “sideloading”, it’s just using software from another place than what Google offers with their walled garden.
Imagine EOS would prevent you from installing software from anywhere else but the official Arch repos. No flatpaks allowed, and it’s called by a different name.
Check out GrapheneOS while it works.
Semantics, as you point out, may be important but it is not the point here. But thanks for sharing your opinion.
I apologize, I did not want to come off as aggressive.
Thank you for calling attention to the issue!
No problem! I agree with you to call things by terms which actually define for what they are. Installing software on a device that you actually own shouldn’t be called “sideloading” as if installing anything from outside the “official channel” represent some form of irregularity or heaven forbid, being illegal.
However, when it comes to iPhone/iOS, “jailbreaking” describes exactly what it is 
Can we not call a word a propaganda would when we know it’s not? While your right installing from those stores isn’t sideloading it’s not the point.
I have a hobby project, an open source android app with ~20 users.
I’m weary of these kinds of identification based things. One thing that it’s not going to be free and maybe they pull a fast one like apple and in the coming years they might want a yearly fee, which is a big problem for open source hobby projects. The bigger thing is, what happens when they decide they don’t like me anymore for some stupid automated reason? It has happened before to many legit TOS respecting devs and were forced to pull the app from the Play Store. Now I have to find ways and instruct users for sideloading the app without a certificate, this could make adoption really difficult.
What if I want my app to be more popular and I can’t do it anymore, because the AI is retarded?
So if you have a few minutes, please send at least an email to your representatives, because this will keep getting worse. I have never thought after they managed to get apple to allow secondary stores at least in Europe, google will want to be more like apple.
Airplanes and ships are loaded from the sides.
I happen to talk to Germans, who are older than 70 years old, and I’m forced to translate English into plain German.
He has a point: software catalogues are not app “stores”, software installations are not “loadings from the side”, warehouses with computers are not “clouds”, heatflows (fans ← heatsinks) are not “airflows”, data-type conversion chains (string → integer; or text to speech) are not “signatures”, matrix multiplications are not (artificial) “intelligence”, and subscribers and gazers are not “friends” nor “followers”, and boulevard filmmakers are not “content creators”, and the commercial broadcasts (»Werbesendungen«) are not “educational tech reviews”, and “forums” and “social media” are merely bulletin boards, pin boards, billboards or notice boards—the Chinese and Japanese word for boards is 板 (ban) and a board for seeing notes is a 看 (kan = “to look”) 板 (ban), a kanban.
The answer is to dump android and make linux phones real.
For that to happen we need a major phone manufacturer or two get on board as well as app developers.
At the moment, I’m just waiting for the GrapheneOS developers to unveil their “GrapheneOS Phone” and see how things will proceed after the Google Pixel phones. I hope F-Droid will be around for a long time to come.
Not a very big ask, all things considered. We’re already most of the way there on the software side of things.
What do you mean? Whatever I saw is clunky slow and buggy. Unless the big corporations decide to make a Linux phone, it’s only going to be a niche product.
Bring back subnotebooks running real operating systems… phones are never going to be any good because there’s too much money in designing them for people who don’t actually use them for anything.
I hope so but I have doubts that it will happen.
On the PC side, there are a few manufactures who support Linux on a few of their models. There are also a few Linux-only manufactures. And what is the market share of Linux on desktop? 3, 4 or 5 percent?
With Android gobbling ca. 73% of the market (and the rest by iOS) and a great majority of the users not even considering to use any alternative (FOSS, privacy respecting) apps on their devices let alone installing a custom rom, I am not seeing how a major manufacture would esteem it economically viable to invest on a Linux phone.
I agree it’s unlikely but as Google enshittifies android over time, maybe they’ll get fed up with them and develop an alternative.
I really hope so.
An atomic mobile Linux with proper application sandboxing and SELinux implementation would be nice to have.
Android is in this respect a more secure system than most of the current Linux distros out of the box.
All that said, I won’t be holding my breath. I cannot actually hold it for much longer than one minute 
I’m going to jump into this and say I really don’t think Its a viable investment for any company right now to try and compete with Google on Android when everyone is shifting focus toward A.I. Once A.I is established it will be what takes over the next phase of “Personal Assistant/Communication”. Rather that format is a phone or a robot or a robotic phone who knows
the pinephone is slow and clunky because even when it released, it did so with already old hardware that was low end in the first place. And that was a long time ago, the software has improved, the hardware has not.
If you read the series in the actual c’t (german magazine), what amount of data (and $$$$) will be generated from your phone/PC/whatever, you will understand whats going on…