• TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    6 days ago

    Ah. “Certified Android Devices.” I think that means I can still use F-Droid on my Pixel running Lineage.

    … if F-Droid continues to exist, of course.

    It’s still complete BS, but technically the title of the article is slightly sensationalistic. Slightly.

    • Cris@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      6 days ago

      In a post today Prud’hommeaux said that Google’s planned changes are incompatible with F-Droid. “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,” he said.

      “If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open source app distribution sources as we know them today,” said Prud’hommeaux.

      (From Google’s dev registration plan ‘will end the F-Droid project’ by The Register which was linked here https://lemmy.world/post/36669429) I’m not so sure any of this is being sensationalized. Every time more details get discussed it becomes clear this is actually a lot worse than early coverage suggested.

      People were talking about this just being bad for the privacy of devs, which would be bad enough alone. But if this structurally makes it so that fdroid can’t distribute apps because the apps aren’t registered to them, and are instead registered to their devs, that’s pretty catastrophic

      Its also become more clear as this has gotten more coverage that part of the impact would be requiring devs to agree to and comply Google terms and conditions. Which suggests that if what they distribute conflicts with those terms and conditions their ability to distribute apps may be taken.

      If those are the same terms and conditions for the Google play store that routinely fuck over devs with no explanation for entirely reasonable shit that’s really not good.

      • TootSweet@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        5 days ago

        Yeah, but Lineage can just not have the same restrictions. And you can (as I do) run Lineage without Google Play Services or whatever. I get that this change will mean that people with normal Android phones without custom roms will no longer be able to install F-Droid or any of the apps on it, and I get that that means less people will have enough interest in F-Droid to contribute to it or write FOSS apps that I might want to be able to run. But the only reason I can think why that could result in the complete cessation of F-Droid development or package maintenance is if nobody runs custom roms moving forward. (Or F-Droid shuts down completely symbolically as a protest.)

        This part of the Register article almost set off my alarm bells:

        In March this year, Google also made a change to the way AOSP is developed; the public aosp-main branch is now read-only and development takes place in a private branch, with code published from time to time as android-latest-release.

        But it sounds like the AOSP updates still do become FOSS eventually. Just not as soon as they used to.

        This might end up being enough to get me to switch to some Linux phone for my next phone, but it’s not like I wasn’t strongly considering it before this news came out.

        I dunno. I still suspect it’s not going to affect me directly as badly as most F-Droid users. And don’t get me wrong, Google is still complete assholes for doing this. But it’s not going to affect my phone for a good while.