If you want to know if your Banking App is compatible: https://privsec.dev/posts/android/banking-applications-compa...
https://shop.fairphone.com/the-fairphone-gen-6-e-operating-s...
Why not? Freedom isn't a given --- you need to fight for it.
A society which value freedom should of course give a lot of it to its citizen, and expect them to defend and improve it for everyone.
A society where freedom is never a given, is not going to foster much of it.
If you would factory-reset your device right now, it would reset to the version of Play Services that came with the installed device firmware, but upon startup the services framework would likely fetch information that it is outdated and won't continue until you have upgraded it.
In this state you could probably use your device and sideload apps, but none of the Google Mobile Services (Play Store, Gmail, Maps, YouTube,...) and 3rd party apps which require Google APIs will work
Apple allows developers to self-sign a handful of apps (exclusively from source!) with short-lived certs - it's a complete PITA to maintain a simple app for personal use, and you still need an account. Google is heading in the same direction.
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/...
I don't have a "legal name". Sounds like some sovcit bullshit. I go by several names, none of which is canonical. Maybe other countries formalize this idea, but the countries where I am a citizen/resident do not.
> A private email address and phone number for Google to contact you. These will need to be verified using a one-time password
I love that email OTP is good enough for this, but apparently not for anything else, where I'll need an approved verified secure attested super official app.
Considering every country has passports and passports all have the person's legal name on them. And thst the passport standard only supports having one name with a primary and secondary identifier. You must be mistaken.
It's also fairly common for instance for women to have multiple names from their marriage(s).
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.
Thats okay, they jumped the shark when the imperative for ads took over.
Combat abuse. I don't think this is a solvable problem, so obviously this won't be a silver bullet. But maybe will it impose more cost on the abusers creating a nicer app store experience for everyone. Or maybe this only imposes cost on the honest ones? I don't know how much validation they do.
> 2. re-build every app with pointless newer api version literally every year or it gets taken down.
Fix vulns. This also gets rid of abandoned apps. It also probably provides an "opportunity" for the dev to agree to new T&C.
> 3. Push an update or a new app or they kill your account.
This one seems shakier to me, but it might feed into an effort to get rid of abandoned apps. But I disagree with this being healthy for the ecosystem, if that's actually the reason.
I'm not trying to defend google, but from working in FAANG, some of this is obvious. None of these things save a significant amount of server or storage costs. Some of it is clearly anti-abuse and efforts to defend themselves from the constant stream of crap that tries to make its way into the app store.
> everything else they do
Google isn't like some dude (sundar) making decisions. It's a bunch of millionaires and billionaires making decisions. There's some high level guidance, but the difference between different divisions is 100% based on who's running that particular show.
When an app works but keeps getting updated, that means the enshittification is starting. How else do you extract money out of a completed app?
In regards to this new package name registration whoever is running the repo of such packages would register a new package name for each app.
"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.
Ironically their phones are the best way to avoid this shit, because they are one of the few that properly support securely installing de-googled Android Versions.
I hope the OEM GrapheneOS is in contact with makes a better alternative.
How much MB (kb?) does this dependency add to apk?
EDIT: The AAR file is 26KB: https://jitpack.io/com/github/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn/V1.3/... But most of it looks to be from R.txt and I think that file gets deduped/compressed during app packaging?
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.
Also you're misquoting. The license is GPL-3, not AGPL.
Something that is too small to be considered creative should be a documented example you copy and adopt into your app, not a dependency.
The only exceptions to this are things like "A dependency that contains all unicode planes and categorizes characters", which isn't creative, but is useful and too large to copy-paste, and also updates over time.
Or the timezone database file, another case of something that should be "public domain" knowledge (uncopyrightable), but makes sense as a dependency.
This is not that sort of thing.
This easily meets thresholds for creative work. The basic concept is nigh-trivial, but the concrete implementation is still creative.
That I doubt; it seems more like it's deliberately large and complex enough to be copyrightable, because otherwise it wouldn't be.