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Android 15 sideloading restrictions are a raw deal for users (www.androidpolice.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] -13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (37 children)

I've been an Android user since the HTC Desire in 2010.

I'm unsure what the author of the article is advocating, since the "raw deal" appears to be geared towards making the Android environment more secure.

The author laments that they now have to manually enable security bypass settings and that some (they call it developers, but I'm not sure if they're referring to Application Development or Phone Platform Development) "developers" can lock down with further API checks.

I've been an ICT professional for over 40 years and security is always a balance. On the one end it looks like a phone in a locked room, inaccessible to anyone, on the other end it's a free-for-all, open to anyone.

I'm not at all sure what the author wants, except for wanting to roll back time to something less secure.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (15 children)

As an It professional I must disagree. Dumbing down the platform isn't good. Let's hope Magisk Deny list keeps working.

[+] [email protected] -9 points 1 week ago (14 children)

Happy to debate.

According to the article there are now more than 3 billion Android users. I have no information to the contrary.

How do you expect to attempt to secure that many devices by allowing the platform to continue as it was?

You call it dumbing down, which I understand, but how do you stop all the click-happy people from installing the next nefarious "game", when they already have little to no chance to avoid email spam and SMS scams, let alone LLM generated "custom targeted" exploits.

I get that there are users who use this (now) vanishing functionality, but are they representative of the total user base, or edge cases? Neither you nor I have any hard data on that, but I know that as an ICT professional, I'm an outlier.

I'm no friend of Google's business model, but I don't believe that they're purposefully shooting themselves in the foot,mind you, I'll concede that it has a poor track record in the past few years.

Let's progress the conversation.

How would you protect essentially computer and security illiterate users from malware in a scalable and sustainable manner?

As an aside, I'm a long term (25+ years) Linux user and have used pretty much everything since the 6502 was part of the picture. In my professional opinion we haven't begun to figure out how to do this in the desktop world, Android is so far the closest we've managed and I'm not seeing anything here (yet) that makes me see this as a mistake.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You call it dumbing down, which I understand, but how do you stop all the click-happy people from installing the next nefarious “game”, when they already have little to no chance to avoid email spam and SMS scams, let alone LLM generated “custom targeted” exploits.

That's the neat Part, you don't

Their choice, their consequences. There are enough warnings on the way there, they are free people and were informed about the risks

As an aside, I’m a long term (25+ years) Linux user and have used pretty much everything since the 6502 was part of the picture. In my professional opinion we haven’t begun to figure out how to do this in the desktop world

App Distribution via Flatpaks and Immutable OS are already pretty much there. Did you try a recent Fedora Version?

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