this post was submitted on 02 May 2026
1412 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
84302 readers
4137 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No, it's not reasonable. Fuck the clueless majority. Stupid people should be prevented from hurting others, but they should not be prevented from hurting themselves. If you manage to download malware that's on you, no big brother should ever be controlling what you can and can't install on your personal fuckin devices. I'm a fucking adult and I do not need or want some bullshit fucking kid mode imposed on my personal shit because Google went full fucking nazi. Companies have no business dictating how you use your own purchases property. Imagine your fucking car saying nah you've already driven twenty miles today it's not safe for you to drive more and just shutting the fuck down. Every motherfucker making these decisions in every industry need to be publicly gruesomely executed. The owner class needs to remember who they're accountable to.
I have some bad news for you about cars…
Don't cut yourself on that edge there, bro.
You know why we first called malware computer viruses, back in the day? Because they spread.
Every infected computer makes the botnet stronger and more effective at infecting future computers.
Every personal email account that's hacked and exploited is a treasure trove of information against all that person's friends and relatives and contacts, and a vector of attack against everyone that person has ever emailed.
So yeah, we need security controls for the same reason we need vaccines. Because public health protects everybody.
If that's the case, then Google really needs to fix the play store because you can absolutely get malware from there. This change is mostly to start locking down the ecosystem to force users to only be able to pay Google a cut of all revenue on the platform (apple already does this). It's bullshit, and it hopefully backfires for Google.
Google also allowed malware ads, and phishing ads since its existence
This change is the opposite. It makes it possible for a user to install the Epic Games Store from their website without seeing a scary warning, and Google won't get a cut of any of the revenues from that store. The same with any other company. Netflix can now offer their app from their website, and people can install it without any warning, and Netflix won't have to send any revenue to Google for people who subscribe in the app.
Uh, no it's not. Quite literally the opposite actually. You can get apks for your apps outside of the play store currently, just have to install them yourself (yeah, you need to check a box to install third party apps once, but that's it). The proposed change from google is mostly to make that harder, and make most users locked more into the play store ecosystem so that Google gets their cut from everything.
It is. As a result of the Epic Games v. Google, Android builds with the Play Store are required to allow users to install apps without any warning at all. They obviously can't allow any app to be installed without a warning because this would be a boon to malware authors, so this is now enabled with verification. You can now even share apps you build with your friends without requiring them to go through an unverified apps flow with a scary warning. Additionally, Google is not allowed to take a revenue cut from those installs.
You're confused because the install process for apps that are not verified (a path that didn't exist before at all) or installed from a system app store has changed. This now has to be done with adb, which takes effect immediately, or via an on-phone process that takes a day to complete. Once it is done, this setting is copied to new phones, so the process actually becomes easier for most people who do this because they don't have to go through the process repeatedly.