Keep Android Open (Stop Google from limiting APK file usage) Published on Feb 25, 2026 Almost 40 organizations, including Techlore, published an open letter to Google opposing Android Developer Ver...
Transcript
This morning, almost 40 organizations publish an open letter to Google demanding they reverse their Android developer verification program. TechLore is one of them, the Rossman Group is one of them, and many of the open source projects that you all use and love are on the list. Now, before I explain why we signed, I need to address something, which is this widely circulated narrative that Google has already backed down from preventing you installing whatever app you want on your phone. They did not back down, and that misunderstanding that seems some... somewhat intentional on their end might be the most dangerous part of the story that needs to be cleared up. Let's get into it. If you're new to this, very quick recap in August of last year, Google announced that as of September of this year, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google, which means you have to pay, developers have to pay a fee to Google, they have to agree to Google's terms and conditions, they have to provide government identification, upload evidence of their private signing key, and list all current and future application identifiers. Keep in mind, this includes for development. who don't even want to use the Google Play Store. That can mean a developer who just wants to publish an app on GitHub. This can mean you just publishing an app for your friends or for yourself on GitHub. No one would be able to install your app on any device with Google Played Services unless you literally did all of these things. This also straight up kills open source app stores like FDroid because they distribute these open source apps without requiring developers to hand over any personal data. They can't comply with this kind of thing, to stay true to their own models. I covered this already in previous videos if you want to learn more. It's also in the description. So what happened is because all of you came together and got angry, we did content about this, after I did articles about this, everyone came forward on socials. It was a really good movement, and we got Google to at least acknowledge... the issues with this somewhat. So they put out this blog article in November where they referenced this vague new flow. They're building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. So this was seen as overall a win, even though it potentially adds to a lot of friction points. I kind of covered the pros and cons of that in an update video when they put this out. Still, somewhat of a win because it wouldn't just outright prevent you from downloading apps. Here is what the official description. still says. To this day, if you go on the website that's linked on Keep Android Open, it specifically says still starting 2026, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed on certified Android devices. And as Keep Android Open says, until such time that they have shown evidence that it will be possible to bypass the verification process without friction, we must believe what is stated on their official page, that all apps from non-registered developers will be blocked once their lockdown goes into it. effect. This means if you get apps from Optenium, if you get apps from Eftroid, if you get apps from Aurora Store, if you get apps from anywhere except the Google Play Services app store, you just can't do it. And if you go a step further and just go, well, I'm not going to use a certified Android device, I'm just going to use something without Google Play services. First off, you are the minority, so this still impacts a ton of people. But even then, what developers are still going to want to publish apps to such a small minority of people? This doesn't just impact your ability to side -out apps. This also impacts the... developer's ability to publish apps to the users that they want to use their applications. And that's actually exactly what FDroid found out. Just put out this blog article. Again, Links for all this stuff are always in the description, but we have since learned that no such advanced flow will be made available prior to the September lockdown. This is from EFroid. They have some kind of internal information from Google that this will not exist. They purported to be gathering early feedback on the design of this advanced flow, but this is also untrue because they said that no such feedback has been sought from anyone outside of Google. So there's a letter. You can read the letter in a description. EFroid published this letter opposing the program with many organizations, including ourselves signing it. We signed it because I don't think that this is abstract. Our audience, all of you, all of you who are new to this channel, are probably pretty familiar with installing apps away from official app stores. We don't want people to feel tied to only a store that's gateheaped by one big tech company, or in this case, two big tech companies. I believe that you should be able to install software from wherever and do whatever you want with it. We've recommended F-Troid for years when Google eliminates alternative distribution channels. That directly affects our audience. It affects all of you, and I think that this is extremely problematic, not just for my audience, but for the overall app ecosystem. Even people who are not side loading apps or installing apps outside of the Play Store, who still get everything from the Play Store, will be hurt by this in the long run, because this does kill the overall free ecosystem. If the free ecosystem continues to flourish and grow and become competitive to Google's ecosystem, people might actually move away from it in the long run, but this hurts that potential as well. So this really hurts everyone. It even hurts iOS users because now there's even less precedent that Apple needs to open up iOS. This impacts... everybody on every operating system. Before we continue, I want to share something that caught my attention, which is what actually powers the privacy-friendly tools that many of you in our audience know about and use. Well, if you dive into it, Signal's Android version is Kotlin first. Mulvad VPN, DuckDego, Asteroid, the entire Fosify suite, and SimpleXChat even uses Kotlin multi-platform across several operating systems in their ecosystem. All of these tools include Kotlin in some way. across various platforms, and there is good reason for this. That's because it's a modern programming language designed for safety and fewer bugs, critical when building tools that protect people's data. It enables cross-platform code sharing, so you don't have to duplicate effort, and developers can build faster without sacrificing security, and because it runs onto JVM, it integrates seamlessly with the entire Java ecosystem, including Spring Framework, one of the most trusted platforms for building secure, backend services. and APIs. It also powers backend infrastructure, though, with frameworks like KOOG. Developers are even building AI agents on the JVM using open source models. So if you're a developer or aspiring to be one and you care about privacy, security, and building tools that respects users in a convenient way across multiple platforms, Kotlin is worth exploring. Trusted services in the digital rights community are already building with it, and there's no reason you can't build your next amazing project with it, too. description to start building with Kotlin and JetBrains tools, including there are coding agents that are available there. So if you're new to this and you're still skeptical, there have been a few things that people have mentioned. One of them is this about security? I would say no, this isn't a security measure. Google Play already has Play Protect built into Google Play Services. It scans and disables malware on any certified Android, regardless of where the app comes from. So Google already blocks malware on apps away from the Play Store. Second, this is not just about FDroid. I really want to lock this in. This kills any kind of alternative distribution permanently. This would be the equivalent of preventing you from installing a .exe on Windows or a DMG file on macOS. The third, and this is really where I get quite concerned. and they do bring this up as well. This creates a massive censorship choke point. Google and Apple have a documented history and a legal responsibility of removing apps under pressure from governments. So tying every app to a verified developer identity makes that pressure infinitely more actionable, and because you can't download apps anymore away from those app stores makes those bans. far more effective in doing anything they can to censor their citizens. So authoritarian regimes will use this, and they already have been using this, and this is only going to make it far more effective. So I'm going to repeat to all of you what you all can do. First, if you are a developer, you need to resist and refuse. You cannot sign up for this app developer thing. You're just signaling to Google that it's okay. This is all okay is what you're signaling. You can also include the free Droid Warn library if you're a developer so that you can notify all of your app users inside of your app about what's going on. I believe we actually rolled this out into our applexus. You can also add a countdown banner on the top of your page. This is what it looks like here. So if you have a website or you have any kind of following following, those are some things that you can implement to help spread the word. If you are not a developer, you can simply start by installing FDroid and installing an alternative app store, something like Optanium, FDroid, whatever you want to use. You can provide feedback directly to Google using this link that's, again, on keep Androidopen.org. I'm going to leave everything down in the description. Use socials, use blog posts, link to keep Android open.org. You can also combat misinformation online. That is huge nowadays. It's everywhere. And I'm sure some people are going to try to defend this pretty passionately. You can also help this project. If you see anything here, if you know a translation for a country that's not on here, definitely translate something, or edit this page if you find a mistake, or if you find a new way to support the cause, definitely edit it. You can also sign a change.org petition, which already has a ton of signatures, but there's no harm in getting more. Finally, you need to contact regulators. You need to contact them about this now. It is probably the best thing that you can do. Will they listen? We don't know, but the more people that you contact, the better. And that way, they are at least notified of the possible... anger that people will have when this kind of think rolls out. This also isn't idealism. This is the same strategy that worked against overly aggressive platform policies before. Non-participation is leverage, and also these things do work and at least signal to the company that people are unhappy about this. Even if they continue to do it, at least we signaled in advance that there is genuine anger and there are serious problems with this, so they can't deny that they were oblivious or didn't know, because they know. because you are all getting out there and getting active. So yeah, I wanted to come forward and share why we signed this letter, and I also wanted to make a video kind of shouting this out, getting some attention on this. I am not neutral, nor is... tech lawyers and organization neutral on platform openness. That's not something that I think is really debatable. We cover privacy, digital rights, we cover all these cool tech things back here because we believe that architecture of the tools that people use every single day can actually increase their freedom with technology in the overall world that we live in. A World War II tech companies that are from the same city that are just maybe a few kilometers away from each other that dominate all of our mobile devices when they both require centralized developer registration is a world with one more lever for surveillance, one more checkpoint for censorship, and one fewer option for people trying to escape this, what seems like unscapable big tech ecosystem. FDroid as an app store is not perfect, but it represents something super important, which is the possibility of distributing software on a device you own without asking permission from developers that care about the same values, and they also care more about you and your rights. So September 2026 is when we might see kind of the end of a formally... open Android ecosystem unless we act now and try to do something about it to fight back. Otherwise, I have really no more strong reason to not recommend you all get iPhones, because this just is pretty much an iPhone with a Google logo on it at this point, unless maybe you get a custom wrong, but that's not going to stop the impacts of the developers, maybe still not pushing updates to you anymore. So go check out keep Androidopin.org. It has everything, it has the open letter, it has the contacts for you to get involved. It has everything. Links are all in the description. Thank you for watching. If this coverage does anything for you or you got value from it, you can become a Technorian down in a description. It's what keeps us able to do what we do. Thank you all very much if you already are a Technorian. I'll see you in the next one. And I actually did an interview with Mark from FDroid talking about this whole issue. If you want to hear a long-form interview with someone who's on the F-Droid team about what is actually going on from their own mouth. So go check that out, and I'll see you all next time.