You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device and losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community. GrapheneOS might not be a big enough community to sustain work on the projects delivered by F-Droid.
> losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community.
For me it seems the opposite - if these "normal" (GMS spyware) Android devices lose the access to F-Droid and it will only be possible to install malware/adware from Google Play, then maybe that will push more people to value unlocking the bootloader..
>You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device
IME such apps are few and far between. The most trouble I ran into is play store refusing to show apps because they claim the app isn't compatible with the device, but that can be worked around with aurora store.
I think parent is talking about Play Integrity being integrated into banking apps. It's a hit or miss depending on the bank, some will be fine without, some with integrate it but not rely on it to directly refuse login, some will require a lower integrity level, and some will actually require the highest integrity level leading to issues on custom ROMs.
They really aren't. The number of apps requiring Play Integrity grows every day, my own bank's app hasn't worked in years and I've long given up on it, I just use it on a second stock device now.
And Google has an answer to the "just install the APK from somewhere else" workaround, too. Many apps now integrate a check that prevents them from running if they're not properly linked to the Play Store.
Depends highly on the bank and what part of the world you're in. Some banks have only a website and no app. Some banks have only an app and no website. Some require an app to access the website. The landscape is widely varied.
My Android is running Lineage without Google Play Services (no microg either).
I had an app that I needed to use, and the only available log-in method was via firebase's SMS. Firebase flat out refused to allow me to login because of Google Play Integrity, and there was no web only option.
I wonder then if the workaround for THAT (losing access to Banking / "Google trust-deriving apps") is to get a second device, wifi-only no-SIM G-Android.
Cumbersome, but any other deterring reasons why "not a good workaround"?
Not much, as it only works on very few high end phones not sold in most countries. Hopefully their Motorola partnership will expand its availability but I'm not confident that'll happen anytime soon.
Sadly forget about it - GrapheneOS will only work on Motorola __flagship__ devices, and most of their budget phones are not even made by Motorola, but rather by the odm such as Tinno, where it's not even possible to unlock the bootloader without exploits.
Ideally yes, otherwise any other AOSP-based ROM. There are many, and they support far more devices than Graphene, though implementations of e.g. Google Play services is more hacky.
This isn't referring to the efforts Google has gone to try to thwart sideloading.
It is another requirement of Google's, where all developers must be registered to them and apps must be signed by them and anything that isn't will be blocked.
Delve into System Settings, find Developer Options
Tap the build number seven times to enable Developer Mode
Dismiss scare screens about coercion
Enter your PIN
Restart the device
Wait 24 hours
Come back, dismiss more scare screens
Pick "allow temporarily" (7 days) or "allow indefinitely"
Confirm, again, that you understand "the risks"
Nine steps. A mandatory 24-hour cooling-off period. For installing
software on a device you own.
The scams this directly targets are well known and common. Someone gets a phishing message, they have someone install some sort of malware on the device, then their bank accounts are drained into some offshore account never to be seen again.
That's why there's a requirement for restarting the phone and waiting 24 hours.
The restart ends the connection for any remote-access software or phone call that might be driving the operation -- and the 24 hour wait period breaks the "urgency" part of the scam that prevents other people who know better from stopping the vicim from continuing.
Because grandmas all over the world are getting swindled by scam apps.
Look, I can't locally install a web extension I wrote on an open-source Firefox browser, because security. I have to install a Developer Edition, or get the extension reviewed and signed by Mozilla, for the very same reasons of thwarting scammers. Is this stifling, or is it making my browser not mine? Is anybody making a big deal out of that?
The world we inhabit is not always friendly. It has a ton of determined and sophisticated bad actors, and a lot of people with less technical savvy than you and me. We have to deal with that, instead of being cantankerous.
It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming. Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
>It's not obvious to me that this will help much with scamming.
Because as a reader to this forum, you're probably more tech savvy that the average person. Moreover this type of scam seems to be more common in Asia than the West, see:
They convince users to download a "government app", grant it accessibility permissions, then use that to take over their phone and drain their bank accounts.
>Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
Where do you draw the line? If you whitelist f-droid, do you have to whitelist third party f-droid repos too? What about other app "stores" like obtanium? Moreover f-droid being less of a "cesspool" is likely because its reach is smaller, not because it has better moderation.
I'm aware of the way the scams work. I'm also aware that scammers tend to be much more motivated to jump through hoops that are put in front them (more so than legitimate users!). Scammers can also talk people through many, many warning signs.
Scammers cannot talk people past a 24 hour wait. This attack is built upon pressure and operates at a scale that makes stealing many identies, building different-enough apps to avoid getting flagged by Google and signing them all non-viable.
And most Android banking malware is distributed through unsafe sideload installs (as opposed to much safer Gatekeeper-style installs, which is what is coming) and are fed to victims through complex attacks involving obtaining a victim's personal information and calling them while credibly pretending to be a local authority or a bank representative. You can read about this wherever you get news about cyber crime.
This is a scourge in South East Asia and Google can do some good here. The only cost is whining from non-technical people. Everyone else will go pay $25 or whatever and sign their app.
Play Store being a cesspit is indeed a problem! But it still is making a constant effort to drive away scammers, so scams don't last too long there. Scammers show sleek-looking web pages offering to install an "official app" from their own apk. Or they have an app that clandestinely sideloads another app. This is being curbed.
But it's limited to a one-time action, not encumbered by additional papers or payment. I don't foresee any trouble using F-Droid (which I use a lot) after I have dismissed the scary screens and confirmed that I know what I'm doing.
You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.
Unless they do something google doesn't like, or trip one of their many automated systems that ban them without recourse. Or they are compelled to revoke a key by a government.
Revocations are for apps being malware and nothing else, much like macOS Gatekeeper (Apple doesn't even revoke certs used by Warez groups to sign cracked apps).
Automated bans can be an issue, but that's an edge case. Google already had the functionality to 'revoke' an app if ordered to do so by a legal authority.
It is much more important to make a real world attack - something that is draining wallets of ordinary people across Thailand/Brazil/SEA in general - harder to achieve. One thing is a political goal of some people in the west, the other is an ordinary person not having the money to feed themselves because a scammer stole it all.
I can't trust Google will keep to that, sorry. Nor can I accept harms being twisted into a further centralised accumulation of power (especially when Google, with all their resources, could likely do much more to prevent these scams than grabbing that power for themselves)
Well, the very good news is that Google is not seeking your trust. You have no say at all. This is the new system, it benefits actual real people over HN commenters and you will just have to deal with it.
Google doesn't have the ability to change the way banking apps work with regards to transferring money from one account to another in Malaysia/Brazil/Thailand. That would be a matter for the national Governments. This is the best approach available.
The 24 hour wait period is so the scammer can't use the element of urgency to keep the victim on the phone where they don't have the opportunity to speak with trusted friends/family who would stop the scam.
Worse: this flow runs entirely through Google Play Services, not the Android OS. Google can change it, tighten it, or kill it at any time, with no OS update required and no consent needed.
And as of today, it hasn't shipped in any beta, preview, or canary build.
It exists only as a blog post and some mockups.
To be fair, that's a one time process. You do not need to do that for every app you want to sideload.
The malware issue that the flow is designed to mitigate is a very real problem. Perhaps there is a better way, but it's not immediately clear what that is.
In addition to what others have said, it means some developers who were building for Android are going to stop. You can't install an app when someone is obstructed from building it in the first place.
> every Android app developer must register centrally with Google before their software can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: all apps.
> Registration requires:
> Paying a fee to Google
> Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions
> Surrendering your government-issued identification
> Providing evidence of your private signing key
> Listing all current and all future application identifiers
Google is not an entity you can can trust with this.
Yes, but not because of those changes in the GMS stock OS, but because the ability to unlock the bootloader (and install the OS you can actually control) is being increasingly limited.
Stock GMS Android was never yours, you only had access to basic permissions, privileged/signature permissions were only accessible to Google/vendors anyway.
I don't care, I run Graphene, and my phone is definitely mine. Most Android apps just work, and the ones that don't are the kind of malware I am happy to do without.
I've been using it for a bit over a year. Installed in a few minutes thanks to WebUSB. A bit of research needed to set the right permissions on Google Play Services.
After that? I only had one application fail due to Graphene's memory allocator. No weird bugs, no need to restart like some siblings are commenting. As close to the "Graphene just works" as it could be.
However, I'm not heavy into Google's ecosystem. Google Pay will not work but I'm not a user, some Google features won't tell you why they don't work but I'm not using them either (Quick Share for instance), none of my apps require the highest Play Integrity level. Maybe the person who say this are a specific type of person where use-cases don't overlap with what breaks on Graphene.
The interaction of secondary users with RCS is borked to all hell. It just plain doesn't work.
Firefox + stock keyboard stopped properly working three days ago, it's back to normal now. No idea what that was about. Restarting was the only way I found to get things working again during that period.
While on the stock Android keyboard, it is clear that the Google one is much better at correcting my taps than the stock one. My typo count has gone up significantly.
Every several weeks the mobile connectivity stops working and nothing short of a restart will get it working again. This might be a bad interaction of the very weird way Google Fi works with a secondary user account.
I've encountered one case of the phone shutting itself off to install an update overnight and not turning on, making me miss my morning alarm.
In the US, there's no way to side step the lack of tap to pay.
Getting apps to work with Android Auto requires some finessing.
These are the things I've encountered in the last 2 months of using Graphene.
Aside from all of that, I really like everything else about the OS. As it stands, it does lacks polish when straying outside of the common path. Not using a secondary account, nor Google Fi on an eSIM, and using the stock browser would likely improve my experience significantly.
I haven't encountered an app that wouldn't work yet (but have installed play services as I do want to use Android Auto).
I would still recommend Grapheme for normal-ish users, as long as you don't go "paranoid mode" with secondary accounts and skipping play services or don't want to use the phone for tons of things beyond phone calls and web browsing. The base experience is that much calmer than stock Android on Pixel.
That's a great attitude until slowly but surely 90% of apps used in day to day life won't function for you: banking, dating, social media, e-commerce, communication/messaging etc slowly freeze you out.
In many countries it's already impossible to use just the web for banking. They either make you install rootkits on your computer or move you to their mobile apps
Wow, that sounds awful. You say country, which makes me wonder—is this the result of a popular type of law or something? I can’t imagine every bank in a country deciding to make that same move. But I live in a large country with lots of banks so I’m sure I have a very biased point of view.
A hidden benefit is having to decide now whether you actually need these things.
Messaging apps will continue working.
Banking apps made by reasonable companies will also. In days of banking being competitive and rather open with many providers offering good value, it's so easy to switch providers. Granted I am relatively poor and keep my banking simple, but I doubt card providers want to increase friction either.
After Revolut started requiring >basic integrity it took me appx 1 day to switch to n26 and nothing of value was lost.
Not being able to use socialmedia, e-commerce, and dating apps sounds great.
Assuming that this Graphene partnership ends up working out, this is probably what I will end up doing once my current iPhone dies. I like my iPhone 13 Pro Max, it's a good phone and I don't really have a desire to get rid of it, but eventually it will break, or get stolen, or in some other way become unusable, and as such it will need to be replaced.
I really hated my Pixel 7 Pro, but I think that was bad hardware and not Android's fault, and since buying my iPhone 13 I have bought my Thinkpad and have been unbelievably impressed with Lenovo hardware (especially since the last Android phone that I bought that I actually liked was my Moto X3).
It would be great if Graphene ends up getting support from at least one first party, because at that point I think there's at least a chance it won't screw with banking apps and the like.
I use GrapheneOS too. Most of the time it works great, with some weird bugs around group messages and needing to restart every now and then to get to a fully functional state between the browser and keyboard properly working with each other and the network connectivity going away. I do enjoy full control on network connectivity and notifications.
But beyond whether the OS is good or not, "fuck you, I've got mine" is not only sad as a position in general, it is also a bad tactical choice, because over long enough timeframes you can't assure that you can keep yours if others are deprived.
I agree about "I got around the system so I don't care how bad it is.", but it is at least still a form of saying "an alternative to this problem is Graphene", and that can't be repeated enough until a whole lot more people are using it, or anything else like Lineage.
Graphene (or anything else) will only stay a useful option if a whole lot more people use it so that government agencies and banks can't ignore that many people. A whole lot more people need to feel they aren't completely alone if they thought about using it, that it's actually a real option and not a kooky crap option.
Right now agencies & companies can totally ignore them all, and everything that still works today is just luck.
I haven't used Graphene myself. At the moment I have a stock rom that's merely rooted using the official manufacturer supplied bootloader unlock, and my small local credit union bank apps work, and the LG app that controls my air conditioners and microwave does not. Even if the bank apps didn't work it wouldn't matter because they have working web sites, and I never wanted an an app for my appliances in the first place.
But any day that could change.
It's just luck the banks have web sites that work in firefox on linux, and just luck there are no functions I need on those appliances that require the app.
I'm running GrapheneOS too and while I've experienced the same, I'm dreading the day any of my banking apps update and suddenly start demanding full Play Integrity API support (GrapheneOS only has Basic) causing them to fail to open. Hasn't happened yet but it could.
It always feels like my phone experience is just a pleasant intermezzo. My banking app (ABN Amro) works, government apps (DigiD) work, everything just works, and I get security and a certain degree of distance between me and Google. I can use F-Droid to install useful apps, and incidentally use Google's app store for apps I need because the rest of the world uses them. GrapheneOS rocks.
Borrowed time. I hope not, but that's the prevailing feeling.
Devs have been warning F-Droid about this for years:
It's quite problematic that someone can currently upload a package name belonging to another organization to the Play Store and that should have been stopped years ago since it was used in many cases for scamming and squatting on package names clearly belonging to others. Package names are meant to start with a reverse domain belonging to the owner such as app.grapheneos for our grapheneos.app domain. They could enforce this based on domains authorizing usage without enforcing ID verification and that's what we would have proposed.
This is one of the ways F-Droid has ignored standard best practices including security practices in a way that's already causing problems but is now a massive issue for them. If they had started doing things properly many years ago when it was first brought up, then they'd be in a much better situation today. They're going to need to deal with this by renaming all their package names to org.fdroid. to avoid issues with the proposed changes. This is problematic because existing users will stop getting updates. It's better to use a prefix than a suffix where a developer could end up changing their mind about whether it makes sense resulting in conflict over the name, which is fair since they still own it if it's their reverse domain.
Being a Graphene user is fine and all, but if this continues it will have a chilling effect on OSS Android development. And that will still effect you.
The communication on this front page is excellent given the intended audience, with the right mixing of emphasis and punctuation for effect.
I'd like to see, if it can be found, some anecdotes about the nuts and bolts of writing any kind of material intended to persuade in this way. How do they a/b test the formatting and so on.
Let me play out a scenario, imagine to use a Desktop Hardware like a complete built rig, you would need a specific OS like Windows 11 and you could not run Linux on it, just because it's a vendor lock-in.
Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above?
I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
It’s the same situation as game consoles. Custom built hardware that is only meant to run the one specific vendor OS. There have been many other computing devices like that in the past as well. The general purpose desktop computer that allows a choice of operating systems is actually less common than the other way. Historically, people didn’t expect to run alternate operating systems on a mainframe, 80s and 90s computers like a Commodore 64, Power PC Macs, Amigas and DOS/Windows machines until Linux came along.
That’s odd, because I remember being a user of MUSIC on the university System/360. I imagine it also sounds odd to all those people who ran AT&T Unix on their PDP/11 systems instead of a Digital OS like RTS/11. Or the people who ran Xenix on their PCs. Or the folks like me who installed OS/2 on what was sold as an MS-DOS machine. Then there were the folks who ran A+ on their Atari.
Oh yeah, odd. Anyway, I’m aware of alternate mainframe OSs but I’m not sure how common using one was. Other than OS2, alternate OSs for other systems were rather rare, though it is worth noting that they were not forbidden or blocked.
Ugh such overreaction. ADB is still a thing. Apple doesn't even have an official command like tool where you can just push an IPA to your phone. Goodness.
I sorta get that reasoning, but is a 24 hour cooldown really going to stop scammers? They're already used to multi-day scams, so wouldn't they just say they'll call back in a day to finish the process?
Yup. The specific scam here is built upon preventing the victim from talking to trusted individuals. A cooldown breaks the spell.
Complex, multi-day pig butchering stuff is not what Google is going after here or would have any hope to defeat. But they can deal with banking malware.
With that reasoning every action would be justified to stop scammers. Google should capture all your calls and check if there could be scamming going on, right?
The current malware situation at android store situation does not help to carry that point:
>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it.
This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.
You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years.
Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.
To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.
With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.
From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order.
I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.
Downvoted for posting facts?
Wow, big shocker. Seems HN dislikes facts even more so than Reddit, imagine that?
Just an FYI:
GrapheneOS is an independent operating system based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and does not come with Google Mobile Services (GMS) or Google’s proprietary "certified" software, meaning Google's rules for Play Protect-certified devices do not apply.
- Operating System Level: GrapheneOS is not a "certified" OS in Google’s ecosystem. It has full control over its own package management and installation processes.
- Sandboxed Google Play: Even for GrapheneOS users who choose to install Sandboxed Google Play Services, these are treated as regular, sandboxed apps and cannot restrict or block the installation of other third-party apps.
- Sideloading Freedom: GrapheneOS will continue to allow users to install apps from any source (like F-Droid or Aurora Store) without requiring developer identity verification
I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other.
So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance.
In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)
You can download torrents on an android and plug usb media devices into it. When I was bicycle touring Europe with my wife a couple years ago we constantly downloaded books for direct input into our kobos and shows and movies to fall asleep to at night you could play from random, often old and crappy, hotel and airbnb televisions. You can’t do any of that on an iPhone.
That said; iPhone is my main phone, has been for a decade or more. But I deeply appreciate what you can do with an android.
The openness of Android also acts as a check of sorts on how restrictive the walled garden can get. If google were to clamp down on useful functionality in the play store, then you could always install apks yourself. But if the latter is no longer an option, then there's much more temptation to google for the former.
I get the feeling that clamping down on useful functionality is often an unfortunate side-effect of closing down paths that are being exploited by criminals to harm users.
What should Google do when a change they are making to protect regular less-technical users breaks functionality needed by more advanced users?
> What should Google do when a change they are making to protect regular less-technical users breaks functionality needed by more advanced users?
Have people read and type in a message saying "I'm not on the phone with a potential scammer who is trying to get me to install a package that may be dangerous", trust people to actually read what they're typing, and if they can't read and comprehend that, stop getting in the way of them shooting themselves in the foot.
The problem with the toxic max-security[0] arguments is that it is always possible to invent a more gullible fool. There is no security measure that will perfectly protect a user from getting scammed out of everything, save for scamming them first and then treating their property as your own. That's the Apple argument. The only way you can keep people secure without falling into the same rhetorical trap Apple employs is with bright red lines that you swear not to cross, no matter how many people wind up getting scammed, because at the end of the day, people are adults, and their property is theirs.
Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that scam-fighting is not Google's job. They can assist with law enforcement (assuming they do not violate the rights of their customers while doing so) but they should not be making themselves judge, jury, and executioner in the process.
If you want a more concrete technical recommendation, locking down device management profiles would be a far more effective and less onerous countermeasure than putting a 24-hour waiting period on unknown app installs. Device management exists almost exclusively for the sake of businesses locking down property they're loaning out to employees, but a large subset of scams abuse this functionality. Part of the problem is that installing a device profile is designed to sound non-distressing, because it's "routine", even though you're literally installing spyware. Ideally, for a certain subset of strong management profile capabilities, the phone should wipe itself (and warn you that it's going to wipe itself) if you attempt to install that profile.
I actually use the ability to install custom software on Android. I actually use the ability for Android apps to bundle JITs, and language interpreters, and other things that allow you to extend the app at runtime. The Apple walled garden would be unusable for me. And moves like this one to turn the Android ecosystem into the Apple ecosystem will generally be regressions.
If anything, I'd like more openness in Android. For instance, apps should not have any control over what data I can back up; I should be able to back up every aspect of every app, restore it to a new phone, and apps should not be allowed to care.
I developed my first Android app when I was around 16 years old and I remember distinctly wanting to publish it on Google Play, but couldn't because they required developers to be 18+, and this was even before they introduced strict identity verification requirements. And iOS was a lost cause as XCode famously requires an operating system that only runs on very specific hardware for which I had no money. No matter, I published an apk on a website and ended up reaching a few tens of thousands of users that way. My app ended up transforming a (niche) industry and making a real impact on the world.
If Android isn't open, we lose the last open mobile operating system, which will have immeasurable negative effects on computing as a whole. People will need permission from either Apple or Google to create any mobile program. If you don't fit into their neat little system, you don't get permission. If I hadn't been able to publish my app for another 2 years I probably would've shelved it, decided it was stupid, forgot about it, got busy with other things, and never published it.
I used to build custom apps for my Android all the time, install APKs, transfer files over USB, use USB tethering on my Linux computer, torrent, use a mouse and keyboard (I think iOS can do this now though), use the integrated terminal, etc.
A few years ago, iOS lacked basic features like widgets, NFC, calculator on their tablets, etc. And iOS still has a completely inferior keyboard (I used to write code and essays on my Android while walking) and a completely inferior notification system. Androids are also the only phones still offering a fingerprint scanner, which is way better for me. These nice things all combine well with the oppenness.
What's worse is that we're clearly in a progression of restriction. Bootloader restrictions, app installation restrictions, "age verification" requirements, etc. Openness is being locked down from every angle with serious momentum, it's not anticipated to stop here.
Just to play devils advocate, the petition is a bit of FUD too, no? I ask as an F-droid user and downloader of unofficial apks. Speaking purely from my own experience, all the side-loaded apps I care about are fungible; I could get them or similar quality equivalents from GPS. With the exception of a 4chan reader, that hasn't been hosted there and likely won't be. I don't mind the 1 day wait too much.
I understand political dissidents and those living under authoritarians may have much more concrete Fs and Ds but for me (us?) it's mostly U.
I do. It's my device. And I've been in the position of having to buy a replacement phone in a pinch; having to wait an extra day before having a usable replacement is not acceptable.
In terms of apps I might not be able to get from the Play store:
- Signal, depending on what country I'm in in the future and whether they've tried to restrict things they can't backdoor.
- Vanilla Music, which remains the best music player I've used. (I wish there were an Android version of Quod Libet.)
- A fully capable version of Termux. (the Play store currently has a less capable version that's maintained separately, which could go away if someone decides to stop putting up with it).
- Syncthing-Fork, which has at times been undermaintained in the Play store.
I'm gonna try out Vanilla Music now. FWIW I use Musicolet from GPS and it's quite nice. I hope to learn whether and how our criteria intersect by exploring Vanilla....
Update: out of the box it seems to be reading tags strangely. Maybe I could fix this studying the settings more, but I'd say you have an upgrade opportunity switching off Vanilla. Signal is hard to replace though.
The problem is the slipper slope. If we let Google get away with this, it will only get worse.
Just see the Play Integrity API making the user experience more difficult on more secure devices like GOS with mo security benefit.
>Play Integrity permits a device with years of missing security patches. It isn't a legitimate security feature. It checks for a device in compliance with Google's Android business model, not security.
This is a very HN view of Android. The "openness" of Android was for mobile device manufacturers, not app developers and end-users. Android's prominence was driven by the myriad of low-cost Android devices by multiple device manufacturers, whereas iOS is only available via iPhones.
The vast majority of users don't care about "openness" of the OS. They care about the utility of their phone in everyday life, e.g., can I access digital payment systems, social media apps, and entertainment apps.
You can’t use stuff like banking apps on a modified device and losing access to normal android devices would be a big blow to the momentum of the F-Droid community. GrapheneOS might not be a big enough community to sustain work on the projects delivered by F-Droid.
For me it seems the opposite - if these "normal" (GMS spyware) Android devices lose the access to F-Droid and it will only be possible to install malware/adware from Google Play, then maybe that will push more people to value unlocking the bootloader..
IME such apps are few and far between. The most trouble I ran into is play store refusing to show apps because they claim the app isn't compatible with the device, but that can be worked around with aurora store.
And Google has an answer to the "just install the APK from somewhere else" workaround, too. Many apps now integrate a check that prevents them from running if they're not properly linked to the Play Store.
I had an app that I needed to use, and the only available log-in method was via firebase's SMS. Firebase flat out refused to allow me to login because of Google Play Integrity, and there was no web only option.
I ended up having to use my spouse's iPhone...
Cumbersome, but any other deterring reasons why "not a good workaround"?
GrapheneOS will sadly stay unaffordable for many.
The most well-known: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/
It is another requirement of Google's, where all developers must be registered to them and apps must be signed by them and anything that isn't will be blocked.
(Or at least, that's their take on this. You can choose to read between the lines, or not, as to whether they have other motivations also.)
But for 1 person wanting to run their own software there are hundreds of people with the potential to install malware/crapware/etc
That's why there's a requirement for restarting the phone and waiting 24 hours.
The restart ends the connection for any remote-access software or phone call that might be driving the operation -- and the 24 hour wait period breaks the "urgency" part of the scam that prevents other people who know better from stopping the vicim from continuing.
That is, fine by me. I can wait for 24 hours once in a few years when I acquire a new mobile phone.
Look, I can't locally install a web extension I wrote on an open-source Firefox browser, because security. I have to install a Developer Edition, or get the extension reviewed and signed by Mozilla, for the very same reasons of thwarting scammers. Is this stifling, or is it making my browser not mine? Is anybody making a big deal out of that?
The world we inhabit is not always friendly. It has a ton of determined and sophisticated bad actors, and a lot of people with less technical savvy than you and me. We have to deal with that, instead of being cantankerous.
Because as a reader to this forum, you're probably more tech savvy that the average person. Moreover this type of scam seems to be more common in Asia than the West, see:
https://cdn.economistdatateam.com/videos/cyber-scams/fake-vi...
https://www.economist.com/interactive/asia/2026/04/10/scam-i...
They convince users to download a "government app", grant it accessibility permissions, then use that to take over their phone and drain their bank accounts.
>Especially when it affects safer app repositories like F-droid more than the cesspit that is the official Play store.
Where do you draw the line? If you whitelist f-droid, do you have to whitelist third party f-droid repos too? What about other app "stores" like obtanium? Moreover f-droid being less of a "cesspool" is likely because its reach is smaller, not because it has better moderation.
https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/
And most Android banking malware is distributed through unsafe sideload installs (as opposed to much safer Gatekeeper-style installs, which is what is coming) and are fed to victims through complex attacks involving obtaining a victim's personal information and calling them while credibly pretending to be a local authority or a bank representative. You can read about this wherever you get news about cyber crime.
This is a scourge in South East Asia and Google can do some good here. The only cost is whining from non-technical people. Everyone else will go pay $25 or whatever and sign their app.
But it's limited to a one-time action, not encumbered by additional papers or payment. I don't foresee any trouble using F-Droid (which I use a lot) after I have dismissed the scary screens and confirmed that I know what I'm doing.
Automated bans can be an issue, but that's an edge case. Google already had the functionality to 'revoke' an app if ordered to do so by a legal authority.
It is much more important to make a real world attack - something that is draining wallets of ordinary people across Thailand/Brazil/SEA in general - harder to achieve. One thing is a political goal of some people in the west, the other is an ordinary person not having the money to feed themselves because a scammer stole it all.
Google doesn't have the ability to change the way banking apps work with regards to transferring money from one account to another in Malaysia/Brazil/Thailand. That would be a matter for the national Governments. This is the best approach available.
Users who use F-Droid are already not as lay. If you distribute stuff that Play Store would ban, your users are likely not as lay, too.
Yes, it's inconvenient, but I see it as a good-faith attempt to limit exposure of lay users to scams, not some power grab.
* people who know what they're doing
* people who are being victimized
Somehow bank vaults and heroin storage boxes don’t take this long.
The malware issue that the flow is designed to mitigate is a very real problem. Perhaps there is a better way, but it's not immediately clear what that is.
I wouldn't consider this "a few buttons", it's enough to turn off the less savvy users
> every Android app developer must register centrally with Google before their software can be installed on any device. Not just Play Store apps: all apps.
> Registration requires:
> Paying a fee to Google
> Agreeing to Google's Terms and Conditions
> Surrendering your government-issued identification
> Providing evidence of your private signing key
> Listing all current and all future application identifiers
Google is not an entity you can can trust with this.
Stock GMS Android was never yours, you only had access to basic permissions, privileged/signature permissions were only accessible to Google/vendors anyway.
I'm no slouch either, I've developed for android for almost a decade.
I'm not disagreeing with ya, just adding a comment so folks are aware that the "Graphene just works" crowd is sometimes a bit hyperbolic.
(idle interest; I use Graphene, but few apps, and everything worked so far)
After that? I only had one application fail due to Graphene's memory allocator. No weird bugs, no need to restart like some siblings are commenting. As close to the "Graphene just works" as it could be.
However, I'm not heavy into Google's ecosystem. Google Pay will not work but I'm not a user, some Google features won't tell you why they don't work but I'm not using them either (Quick Share for instance), none of my apps require the highest Play Integrity level. Maybe the person who say this are a specific type of person where use-cases don't overlap with what breaks on Graphene.
Firefox + stock keyboard stopped properly working three days ago, it's back to normal now. No idea what that was about. Restarting was the only way I found to get things working again during that period.
While on the stock Android keyboard, it is clear that the Google one is much better at correcting my taps than the stock one. My typo count has gone up significantly.
Every several weeks the mobile connectivity stops working and nothing short of a restart will get it working again. This might be a bad interaction of the very weird way Google Fi works with a secondary user account.
I've encountered one case of the phone shutting itself off to install an update overnight and not turning on, making me miss my morning alarm.
In the US, there's no way to side step the lack of tap to pay.
Getting apps to work with Android Auto requires some finessing.
These are the things I've encountered in the last 2 months of using Graphene.
Aside from all of that, I really like everything else about the OS. As it stands, it does lacks polish when straying outside of the common path. Not using a secondary account, nor Google Fi on an eSIM, and using the stock browser would likely improve my experience significantly.
I haven't encountered an app that wouldn't work yet (but have installed play services as I do want to use Android Auto).
I would still recommend Grapheme for normal-ish users, as long as you don't go "paranoid mode" with secondary accounts and skipping play services or don't want to use the phone for tons of things beyond phone calls and web browsing. The base experience is that much calmer than stock Android on Pixel.
Dating… well, the goal for most people is to exit the dating pool anyway.
Social media is bad.
Messaging apps will continue working.
Banking apps made by reasonable companies will also. In days of banking being competitive and rather open with many providers offering good value, it's so easy to switch providers. Granted I am relatively poor and keep my banking simple, but I doubt card providers want to increase friction either. After Revolut started requiring >basic integrity it took me appx 1 day to switch to n26 and nothing of value was lost.
Not being able to use socialmedia, e-commerce, and dating apps sounds great.
I really hated my Pixel 7 Pro, but I think that was bad hardware and not Android's fault, and since buying my iPhone 13 I have bought my Thinkpad and have been unbelievably impressed with Lenovo hardware (especially since the last Android phone that I bought that I actually liked was my Moto X3).
It would be great if Graphene ends up getting support from at least one first party, because at that point I think there's at least a chance it won't screw with banking apps and the like.
But beyond whether the OS is good or not, "fuck you, I've got mine" is not only sad as a position in general, it is also a bad tactical choice, because over long enough timeframes you can't assure that you can keep yours if others are deprived.
Graphene (or anything else) will only stay a useful option if a whole lot more people use it so that government agencies and banks can't ignore that many people. A whole lot more people need to feel they aren't completely alone if they thought about using it, that it's actually a real option and not a kooky crap option.
Right now agencies & companies can totally ignore them all, and everything that still works today is just luck.
I haven't used Graphene myself. At the moment I have a stock rom that's merely rooted using the official manufacturer supplied bootloader unlock, and my small local credit union bank apps work, and the LG app that controls my air conditioners and microwave does not. Even if the bank apps didn't work it wouldn't matter because they have working web sites, and I never wanted an an app for my appliances in the first place.
But any day that could change.
It's just luck the banks have web sites that work in firefox on linux, and just luck there are no functions I need on those appliances that require the app.
Borrowed time. I hope not, but that's the prevailing feeling.
It's quite problematic that someone can currently upload a package name belonging to another organization to the Play Store and that should have been stopped years ago since it was used in many cases for scamming and squatting on package names clearly belonging to others. Package names are meant to start with a reverse domain belonging to the owner such as app.grapheneos for our grapheneos.app domain. They could enforce this based on domains authorizing usage without enforcing ID verification and that's what we would have proposed.
This is one of the ways F-Droid has ignored standard best practices including security practices in a way that's already causing problems but is now a massive issue for them. If they had started doing things properly many years ago when it was first brought up, then they'd be in a much better situation today. They're going to need to deal with this by renaming all their package names to org.fdroid. to avoid issues with the proposed changes. This is problematic because existing users will stop getting updates. It's better to use a prefix than a suffix where a developer could end up changing their mind about whether it makes sense resulting in conflict over the name, which is fair since they still own it if it's their reverse domain.
I'd like to see, if it can be found, some anecdotes about the nuts and bolts of writing any kind of material intended to persuade in this way. How do they a/b test the formatting and so on.
Why is this acceptable for phones but would not for the case above?
I know a lot of people don't care, and that's ok, but we should root for an open choice for the users.
This measure is about making it harder to pull off a specific type of scam that is plaguing South East Asia. No conspiracy.
For actual information on the purpose of this change rather than conspiracies, I refer you to https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-de...
Since the victims of these scams do not typically own a traditional computer/cannot be pressured to get to one quickly, ADB will remain a thing.
Complex, multi-day pig butchering stuff is not what Google is going after here or would have any hope to defeat. But they can deal with banking malware.
The current malware situation at android store situation does not help to carry that point:
> https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/03/18/60-milli...
> https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/apps_android_malware/
> https://www.androidheadlines.com/2026/04/novoice-android-mal...
This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.
In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this.
And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.
Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps.
To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that.
With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.
I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.
Just an FYI:
GrapheneOS is an independent operating system based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and does not come with Google Mobile Services (GMS) or Google’s proprietary "certified" software, meaning Google's rules for Play Protect-certified devices do not apply.
- Operating System Level: GrapheneOS is not a "certified" OS in Google’s ecosystem. It has full control over its own package management and installation processes.
- Sandboxed Google Play: Even for GrapheneOS users who choose to install Sandboxed Google Play Services, these are treated as regular, sandboxed apps and cannot restrict or block the installation of other third-party apps.
- Sideloading Freedom: GrapheneOS will continue to allow users to install apps from any source (like F-Droid or Aurora Store) without requiring developer identity verification
So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance.
In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)
That said; iPhone is my main phone, has been for a decade or more. But I deeply appreciate what you can do with an android.
What should Google do when a change they are making to protect regular less-technical users breaks functionality needed by more advanced users?
Have people read and type in a message saying "I'm not on the phone with a potential scammer who is trying to get me to install a package that may be dangerous", trust people to actually read what they're typing, and if they can't read and comprehend that, stop getting in the way of them shooting themselves in the foot.
Put it behind an USB ADB only toggle and be more transparent to avoid slippery slope?
Furthermore, we have to acknowledge that scam-fighting is not Google's job. They can assist with law enforcement (assuming they do not violate the rights of their customers while doing so) but they should not be making themselves judge, jury, and executioner in the process.
If you want a more concrete technical recommendation, locking down device management profiles would be a far more effective and less onerous countermeasure than putting a 24-hour waiting period on unknown app installs. Device management exists almost exclusively for the sake of businesses locking down property they're loaning out to employees, but a large subset of scams abuse this functionality. Part of the problem is that installing a device profile is designed to sound non-distressing, because it's "routine", even though you're literally installing spyware. Ideally, for a certain subset of strong management profile capabilities, the phone should wipe itself (and warn you that it's going to wipe itself) if you attempt to install that profile.
[0] https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf
If anything, I'd like more openness in Android. For instance, apps should not have any control over what data I can back up; I should be able to back up every aspect of every app, restore it to a new phone, and apps should not be allowed to care.
If Android isn't open, we lose the last open mobile operating system, which will have immeasurable negative effects on computing as a whole. People will need permission from either Apple or Google to create any mobile program. If you don't fit into their neat little system, you don't get permission. If I hadn't been able to publish my app for another 2 years I probably would've shelved it, decided it was stupid, forgot about it, got busy with other things, and never published it.
I use this to occasionally build and install Android apps from github.
These are often out of date and need some tweaks but I can do it on a whim (I certainly wouldn't bother if there was a paywall).
A few years ago, iOS lacked basic features like widgets, NFC, calculator on their tablets, etc. And iOS still has a completely inferior keyboard (I used to write code and essays on my Android while walking) and a completely inferior notification system. Androids are also the only phones still offering a fingerprint scanner, which is way better for me. These nice things all combine well with the oppenness.
What's worse is that we're clearly in a progression of restriction. Bootloader restrictions, app installation restrictions, "age verification" requirements, etc. Openness is being locked down from every angle with serious momentum, it's not anticipated to stop here.
Millions? Are you sure?
Even so, Android has billions of users who want secure app management by default.
I understand political dissidents and those living under authoritarians may have much more concrete Fs and Ds but for me (us?) it's mostly U.
I do. It's my device. And I've been in the position of having to buy a replacement phone in a pinch; having to wait an extra day before having a usable replacement is not acceptable.
In terms of apps I might not be able to get from the Play store:
- Signal, depending on what country I'm in in the future and whether they've tried to restrict things they can't backdoor.
- Vanilla Music, which remains the best music player I've used. (I wish there were an Android version of Quod Libet.)
- A fully capable version of Termux. (the Play store currently has a less capable version that's maintained separately, which could go away if someone decides to stop putting up with it).
- Syncthing-Fork, which has at times been undermaintained in the Play store.
Update: out of the box it seems to be reading tags strangely. Maybe I could fix this studying the settings more, but I'd say you have an upgrade opportunity switching off Vanilla. Signal is hard to replace though.
Just see the Play Integrity API making the user experience more difficult on more secure devices like GOS with mo security benefit.
>Play Integrity permits a device with years of missing security patches. It isn't a legitimate security feature. It checks for a device in compliance with Google's Android business model, not security.
(https://xcancel.com/GrapheneOS/status/2036610983888588818#m)
The vast majority of users don't care about "openness" of the OS. They care about the utility of their phone in everyday life, e.g., can I access digital payment systems, social media apps, and entertainment apps.