For anyone reading this, donate to PostmarketOS if you can so we can escape google forever!

They are already here

Yeah, it's pretty crazy comparing this to some of the stuff Microsoft got in trouble for with Internet Explorer back in the '90s.

This is almost what apples infrastructure is....

I say Linux.

That's life before 2000, or even up to 2005 or like. Was not bad, really. Internet was slow and stuck in computers, astalavista, radium, emule and burning dvds The evolution of cellphones into smartphones was somehow a bad move for humanity

Spoken like someone who isn't responsible for others. My kid is ADHD and autistic. She's high functioning, but that doesn't mean I get to just be unreachable. I'm several people's emergency contacts. I have to travel unknown places all the time and be there exactly to get the help my kid needs.

I'm a single mother. I trade off whatever they are stealing from me for the ability to get cheaper versions of what my kid needs. My job is flexible, so it allows me to take my kid to what she needs with the understanding that I can answer questions when I'm away.

Oh, I also have a deadly neurodegenerate disease that is only kept in check by this specific medication that I need to be places for a while to get. I like my phone reminding me to go get that and also being able to fill out the paperwork on my phone because of my shitty hands.

A lot of people I see who are like, "Just live without a phone!" Are not the people who are actually responsible for people and/or things. I was like that when I was young, but then you know, I became a pillar of my family and friend network. People who are unreachable when needed are dropped from my network. I know several people who when I actually needed them and it was very dire, were unreachable. I left them messages and everything. Nope. Don't think they ever knew the issue. Dropped. Sorry even in the 90s and 00s, you were expected to listen to your voice mails promptly. I shouldn't have to mount a search party to find you, which is actually necessary for some people I know.

Sounds wondeful, though it's not possible in some parts of the world. Here in Sweden you need a phone to use a lot of services, and very few places still accept cash as payment.

Because there are more iPhones in America.

Ignore that Apple also makes it impossible to side load apps.

Apple was the canary in the coal mine for this behavior in the EU. Apple was forced to allow third party apps, so Apple mandated that everyone had to register with them, and pay them their yearly fee, and then developers had to pay Apple another fee (core technology fee, still double dipping), and governments were completely fine with that. (And developers will happily jump through more hoops to develop on iOS).

Google saw this and decided if they can, so can Google. And this technically is the easier of the two as at least this doesn't require every developer to register with Google this way.

Given that the official Google Play store has distributed intentionally malicious apps in the past, I'd say it reduces it by approximately none.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html

and worse, scams that are ALL over the play store

Didn't I hear that they're planning to release graphene on Motorola?

It should be just called installing, but they call it sideloading to make it sound shady and complicated.

No that is side loading, and they're making it more difficult