Assume for the sake of argument it makes sense for Google to authenticate the identity of anyone publishing on their store; Google is in a sense endorsing those products and so endorsing the developer.

( See: https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/115090955060583885 )

But what Google is now saying is that authentication/approval will be required *to develop at home*; if you want to write software on their OS you must *start* by getting that approval, rather than writing software then getting approval to publish with Google.

And of course Google is also now enforcing they must authenticate/approve software on *other stores*; any alternative store running on a regular Play device will only be able to *restrict* who is allowed to write software, not expand it. If next year due to some new US law Google blocks developer registrations from Venezuela, and you are Venezuelan, setting up an app store that authenticates Venezuelan developers will not be possible without your users OS homerolling.

@mcc This will, honestly, back me completely out the exits of the Google ecosystem.

I have long resisted switching to iPhone because I enjoyed the idea that even if I'm not writing Android software right now, I could get back into it with just a couple hours spent installing and configuring Android Studio and bothering to learn rudimentary Kotlin.

If they're going to make me register with them to put my own software on my own phone? Fuck'em. Apple's UI is better if I'm going to live in a walled garden, and I'll go to PinePhone for my playphone.

(Sympathy for the devil: they're in the position Microsoft was in with Windows in its heyday, and suffering the same global pressures. Windows needed auto-updates because beyond a critical threshold, users are just too bad at administering computers and it became a community health issue when computers are all networked together. If they're saying "Look, we tried side-loading and the app store, and people are still too clueless to protect themselves and get scammed all the time, here are the numbers, we can literally help millions of people by making this change" ... I believe them.

Enmity for the devil: and I don't use a Windows machine as my day-to-day machine BECAUSE I can't stand what they had to do to make it "safe for grandma to use")

@mark @mcc But...

Apple was doing this very thing from the start... In the past you couldn't even run third party stuff on Apple systems at all...

You're leaving one bad place for doing a bad thing to go to another that did the same bad thing long ago and limits your options even further. This is a mistaken kneejerk response.

(Really your best answer here is a third party ROM — yes I should say OS, but everyone insists on calling them ROMs because they like to use immutable images for the base I guess — and then you don't have to worry about the limitations either one is doing. LineageOS, CalyxOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, even probably just plain AOSP should all be fine. Don't even install gapps and presto, no google.)

@nazokiyoubinbou @mcc Avoid the hubris to assuming other people don't have deep experience with ecosystems.

I'm consciously picking my favorite taskmaster while recognizing they are a taskmaster. This isn't kneejerk.

(... Kneejerk would be buying a pinephone tomorrow assuming it's usable. Did that once; don't plan to do it again unless the platform prints itself out for my use case).

ETA: An alternate Android-based OS is in the space of things I'm considering. The problem is that the Android UX is already (for me at least) inferior to the Apple UX and I don't by default trust a third-party to have improved on that (they generally lack Google or Apple's resources to do the hard work of solving the ten thousand tiny problems that make the difference between "This feels intuitive" and "I have to care about what a systemd is or my thumb drive doesn't work").

@mark How did you find the quality control on the pinephone btw because I want to be interested but I've heard bad things

@mcc The one I owned I had no problems with the physical artifact. But I only have the one datapoint.

@mark thank you for this datapoint

@mcc @mark we have no problem with either our pinephone or our pinephone pro as physical objects

(all our problems with them arise from the fact that we chose to use a phone with no OS and no firmware and try to solve that ourselves)

@ireneista @mcc @mark couldn't have picked a better time to be working on Linux based platforms could I??

@technobaboo @ireneista @mcc Honestly, the work is there and I really want to see success. World could use a truly independent third option that isn't either Apple or Google.

... I'm just too tired to participate anymore. I need the thing I'm carrying in my pocket all the time to not be experimental, or prototype, or kitted out with scripts I wrote in its critical path because I don't trust my code to work. 😉

@mark @ireneista @mcc that's fair, but in my case i totally am fine with my daily driver being a janky mess if i can wrangle it like a bucking bronco and still get amazing stuff done on it :D