AppleMango

I feel bad for the people on the developing team who had no idea this may be used for surveillance

yes I understand, but I was just mentioning that the process is convoluted for everyone involved. people tend to forget the troubles of devs and maintainers.

In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents, including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.

The F-Droid project cannot require that developers register their apps through Google, but at the same time, we cannot “take over” the application identifiers for the open-source apps we distribute, as that would effectively seize exclusive distribution rights to those applications.

(implying that even non-play store apps needs Devs to give their info to google)

source: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

granted, this is a secondary source, but it does link the primary source within the quoted text.

Convoluted process where the developer of the app has to sell their soul to Google

They had no reason to wait till the AI boom for this, could have done it long ago when google assistant was the only one allowed access to these things.

Can't they not let Android get locked down in a few months too? It'll almost become as bad as iOS at that point. Who knows they might even block installation of other OSs in the future.

fast ≠ widespread or consistent. mobile data tends to have excruciatingly low upload speeds (at least in my region)

well if they're proper journalists then they shouldn't, journalism is not the job where you push your opinions into others.

This is probably a case of heavy survivorship bias. Some don't get caught, and the ones who get caught doing actually crazy exploits we don't hear about.

Apparently it requires a Microsoft account to work, so local-only accounts are safe (in the case of patched windows ISOs). But this only disabled GDID and there's still no guarantee that there aren't other idenfiers.

The only part of "just works" that's still "just" working is that windows comes installed by default on the vast majority of laptops. I dread having to use windows each time I have to, not because linux is that much better, but because windows is really just that much worse.