If you haven’t seen this yet, Google is planning to require mandatory developer identity verification for all Android apps, including apps distributed outside the Play Store, taking effect September 2026. This affects every independent and open source Android developer directly.
This is not just about the Play Store. After September 2026, on any certified Android device, applications from unverified developers will be blocked by default. The only proposed bypass, the “advanced flow”, exists only as a blog post and has not appeared in any beta, dev preview, or canary release. No one outside Google has seen it.
The community has been fighting back at keepandroidopen.org:
- Read the full breakdown of what this means
- Sign the open letter (organisations only)
- Contact your national regulators — contacts listed by country on the site
- Add the countdown banner to your project
September 2026 is closer than it looks. The time to push back is now.
verified but still not responsible.
Google is the biggest threat to anything good in technology, this cancer must be eradicated
There actually has been an update on this. The advanced flow has been revealed and it’s like a 24-hour wait and a few prompts to go through and I’ll reboot and enabling developer mode… Bit of friction but all in all it’s better than nothing I guess.
The dev verification is “optional”. With the condition that if a developer doesn’t then users can only install after jumping through a few hoops.
Yeah at least it’s better than Apple’s approach, where you have to connect your phone to a PC once every 7 days to reactivate Developer Mode. Don’t have a computer? Fuck you!
That said, I have zero faith in Google sticking with the compromise solution in the long run. They’re going to try to force the change on everyone again in the future, once they’ve broken us down a bit more.
Meanwhile at least we have a little longer than September before they actually ruin the platform completely… How long? Who could say but I’ll take what small victories I can get
Starting to think phones should just go back to being exclusively for calling and texting anyway, maybe emailing too. Everything else can be done from a laptop. Does it really make our lives better to have access to everything through our phones?
I do like being able to look things up on a browser and I use the gps mapping a lot but most of the other stuff is fluff.
Yeah, I’m not dragging a laptop around everywhere with me to search business opening hours / locations etc
Sure, mapping and locale data is extremely helpful and makes up a significant portion of what I use my phone for when I’m out and about. My question is more geared towards whether the ability to bank, shop or use social media from my phone is really necessary.
Obviously, it’s a personal choice and I’m more thinking aloud when I question whether I’d be okay with the trade-off of having a phone with fewer capabilities.
Wait that’s not a thing already?
So people can just make scam apps and once you report it to the App Store there is no recourse because even the company doesn’t know who they are?
So the way compute used to work, is you could install any program you want from anywhere. You could buy a program from a web site or copy a disk and install the program.
Smartphones have been around since the late 1990s in various forms, it used to be, you could just install whatever you want.
Then, in 2008, Apple released the iPhone app store, and it was a closed space, a “walled garden”. You can only install apps on their phone if they approve them.
Google decided to join the phone race and released a phone where one could still install applications from anywhere, not just their store. There are multiple stores like others have mentioned, or you can download an APK file from anywhere and install it on your phone.
Part of their behavior since is slightly open to interpretation, as the technology is now used by everyone, not just tech nerds. People could install “bad” programs, and they could lose money, cell networks could be compromised, etc.
It likely costs a lot of companies a lot of money to deal with dumb users doing stupid shit. So from one perspective, making it extremely hard to install unknown programs from anywhere will curb that expense.
It could be a defensive move, as LLMs now allow anyone to write computer software with very little knowledge of it, and it is just bad timing.
On the other hand, since the beginning of computers, the owner of the machine could run whatever software they wanted.
This move by Google is basically making it so there is NO mobile compute platform that the owner of the device actually owns, and is allowed to do with their hardware what they want. Apple or Google, that is it. Apple had always been closed, which should have been made illegal, but I digress.
It has been a slippery slope with Android for almost 2 decades, and this move is basically the end of the ability for free humans to install free software from anywhere on the hardware they own and paid anywhere up to $3000 for.
Basically a huge dive for personal freedom on a planetary scale, decided by one corporation.
The recourse has been removal.
And the solution proposed is not requiring identification specifically for Play store developers, but any developer at all.
Removal but no means for consumers to seek money back or damages because it’s just the Wild West?
I think if you’re publishing an app to a public store then they should know who the fuck you are.
This includes not in the Google play store so like f-droid or like how people would get software from a places website or GitHub or sourceforge or wherever and installing it like you can on Windows or a Mac or Linux
google can eat shit.
the moment I see a viable linux phone, I’m out.
But they did this knowing that at this point there is not a viable alternative. It’s both monopoly, vendor lock, eee and enshittification all at once…
by 2027 there will be a linux phone. consumers won’t put up with this shit and vendors aren’t so blind to see an opportunity.
2127…
2227…
2327…
2427…
Surely 2527 will be the year of the Linux phone…
There was already a Linux phone and even a Firefox phone, but with no wide app support it’s going to be a failure, just like it happened with Windows Phone.
And I’m saying this as a person who would love for a true Linux phone alternative to succeed.
Everyone freaking out when this is actually something you would want as a consumer. 8 want to know who the fuck is making my apps, where they are from, and where my data is going. If you don’t want this. I am guaranteeing you get viruses and shit all the fucking time.
In play store fine, but any other sideload store, why?
As a consumer I want privacy and freedom, not a monopoly that controls what I can or cannot do on MY device that I bought with MY money. So up until now I installed any app that I wanted and never got any virus ever:) While you might be happy with your data going to google, I’m not.
Nope. As a consumer i dont want one conglomerate to have power to decite what i can and cannot do on my personal device.
It would mean they have 100% control over me as a consumer.
If you use a Google Pixel phone, you’re the biggest chud.
It is, ironically, the only phone were you can install GrapheneOS, arguably the most secure and private phone you can have today.
I never believed that shit. mostly because Google designed and developed the phone and god only knows what kind of firmware backdoors are on any of the hardware.
besides that, any money that goes to google only fuels their thirst for power.
You have a fair concern but I do want to say it is possible to get the phones secondhand. Even if someone does buy the phone just to install GrapheneOS then at least they only get a small purchase vs a lifetime of selling your data and continuing to profit off of them long-term.
I understand that, but even if you buy it secondhand it only enables someone else to buy a new pixel at a cheaper cost to them. if they’re forced to hold their old phones because the market is stagnant, the likely result will be a drop in sales to google.
Fuck them. I hope open source / de-googled android can somehow survive this.
L!
So much for their “don’t be evil” policy
didnt they drop it like decade ago?
Yeah, about the same time we started cutting Google out of our day to day. Every time we hear about Google it’s just getting more and more evil/greedy in one way or another
I don’t get it… Google‘s main appeal over Apple is that you can install anything on Android. It runs worse, is less stable and sometimes just does dumb stuff. That’s like if Nintendo would get rid of Mario/Pokémon
I don’t think that’s really the main appeal, honestly. The main appeal is just that it isn’t Apple. And were I someone who didn’t care about the installation of third-party applications, I wouldn’t be running to buy an iPhone. Android is just plain more customizable and if you need a quality of life feature, you’re probably going to find some way to have it.
Android is just plain more customizable and if you need a quality of life feature, you’re probably going to find some way to have it.
Yes.
I used to feel that way about stock Android, but the really useful apps dried up on Google Play a few years back.
Discovering F-Droid brought back the joy of customizing Android, for me.
My conclusions:
- Much of the charm of Android is already gone for the average user, but many haven’t noticed.
- Making F-Droid harder to install isn’t going to help.
I’m not sure what Google has done to alienate the folks writing quality free apps, but whatever it is, most of them are only on F-Droid, already.
This feels like Google is just shutting the door on the walled garden they’ve been building for awhile.
You can get an iPhone at around 500$. Below that price, sure, Android is good. But once you reach the price at which you could get an iPhone, why not get one in the first place? Android isn’t more customizable in this day and age than iPhone.
Besides custom launchers and icons, the only thing that comes to my mind is custom WhatsApp messaging sound.
Except now that feature is locked
Android’s own appeal probably died somewhere in 2013 or 2014, but it has always kept strong for a very simple reason: phone prices. You could either pay 700 dollars for an iphone, or 200 for an android
That was it before they got a solid fanbase. Now the main appeal is that they are mostly cheaper phones.
Cheaper, but not by far:
iPhone 17 Pixel 10 iPhone 17 Pro Pixel 10 Pro iPhone 17 Pro Max Pixel 10 Pro XL € 979 899 1339 1099 1489 1299 Why make this a table instead of a list?
I just love having to scroll horizontally to read a comment.
You are taking the flagship phones. If you want a simple, functional phone, you can find some decent ones for a price as low as 200€
Indeed, since the company behind Android+PlayServices also sells phones running Android+PlayServices. But aside from this it’s on me for reading something that was not written.
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I’ve never used a banking app. Don’t they usually have web sites? What am I missing on?
I am forced to use the app to access the website.
Nothing, but in some countries banks force you b to use apps. You know, "for your security ".
Pretty much. My bank imposes transfer limits on the web portal vs the app, since there’s purportedly more security in the physical device rather than a web page accessible from any system.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with this, it means those apps also have to be searching for things like “Is USB debugging on? Is this running in an emulator? Is the device rooted?”
None of these are bad checks to make from a security perspective, but by relying on the app on a single device as a defacto MFA hurts the ability to manage personal finances when you’re in a position like this, with Google defining the security requirements of their ecosystem at a higher level than any single app.
Banks, government apps and main apps (Whatsapp, etc.) are on Google Play. It’s clear governments will stick with Google. What is left to know is how seriously democratic governments take civil liberties.
There have been talks in Europe about how we are dependent on American tech for our digital infrastructure. Some politicians even pushing for an alternative to Apple and Google. I hope everyone else wakes up before it’s too late.
I was already looking flashing my Fairphone with Sailfish. But this move of Google is the final straw. Sailfish fully supports android apps. I’m already running every google app in a sandbox and stopped using my contactless payment.
