Keep Android Open
In August 2025, Google announced that starting next year, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google.
This registration will involve:
- Paying a fee to Google
- Agreeing to Google’s Terms and Conditions
- Providing government identification
- Uploading evidence of an app’s private signing key
- Listing all current and future application identifiers
Sign the open letter. And get active to help oppose the enactment of the policy in other ways listed on the website. Are there any more ways to oppose this?
The big problem with this is that I don’t like android.
It works relatively well, it’s support is ok, it’s probably better than apple because their garden walls are higher. But it’s not at all the operating system I would like to have. It’s already too restrictive, I have not seen/found good app building docs that make it actually easy and convenient to create “apps” and that massively rubs me the wrong way.
With that move, google is enshittfying android, but that doesn’t mean we have to resist the enshittification and keep android, we can also let them do it and move to something else. In theory, anyway.
So I’d like to see more calls for different OS, forks or stuff like
https://www.fsf.org/news/librephone-project
I agree; the best option is to ditch Android … those who can do it. Some Banking apps, public transport ticket apps, and post/mail-delivery apps seem to be a hard requirement for people in real live though. Which leads to the question: But what about people who can not ditch their phones and can not afford multiple devices (this decade)? Maybe laws that introduce a hard requirement that everything should work through a (open source) web-browser can help, but then what about “offline” use cases?
It feels like we are building our own digital prison in real time.
There really should be a focus on government-level efforts in the EU, to force mobile manufacturers to standardise and open source all firmware sold in its jurisdiction. All OSS mobile OS’s (not on custom OSS hardware) rely on Android solutions because mobile hardware is bespoke, closed source, and non-standard from device to device; the opposite to the PC ecosystem that enabled Linux. The Apple/Android duopoly won’t be broken if mobile hardware vendors can continue creating custom closed-source firmware for their hardware, and there’s simply no reason to allow this anti-competitiveness to continue.
For now, Android is the best compromise between functionality and openness that’s suitable for daily use, especially GrapheneOS. Hopefully some of the Linux alternatives will develop to that point soon, but by all accounts they’re not there yet. So it’s worth fighting to keep what we have until we can use something more open.
I think they are try & for those that don’t know the back end commands, there AI to help. I know others don’t trust AI but they are decent with code.
I honestly loved the windows phone but sane as you, between Android vs Apple, the choice is only 1.
The big problem is that there are no entry-level linux phones. All of them I have seen are over 200, and evn those are horribly underpowered. It wouldn’t be that hard to make a 140€ phone and upmark it to 180€ for the effort of developing Linux for it?
My problem wtih the existing linux phones is that they are usually clearly labled as “experimental beta device + OS, only recommended for experienced users” and for linux, that’s scary to me. I’ve been using it for over 10 years, but as a user, you know?
Agreed. The UI sucks (peak was jellybean, went downhill since) and it’s so hard to create software for it. Also way too complex.
When they stopped naming it, it went downhill.