Android

33638 readers

869 users here now

DROID DOES

Welcome to the Android community on Lemmy. Here you can participate in amazing discussions and events relating to all things Android.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules

1. All posts must be relevant to Android devices/operating system.

2. Posts cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

3. No spam, self promotion, or upvote farming. Sources engaging in these behavior will be added to the Blacklist.

4. Non-whitelisted bots will be banned.

5. Engage respectfully: Harassment, flamebaiting, bad faith engagement, or agenda posting will result in your posts being removed. Excessive violations will result in temporary or permanent ban, depending on severity.

6. Memes are not allowed to be posts, but are allowed in the comments.

7. Posts from clickbait sources are heavily discouraged. Please de-clickbait titles if it needs to be submitted.

8. Submission statements of any length composed of your own thoughts inside the post text field are mandatory for any microblog posts, and are optional but recommended for article/image/video posts.

Community Resources:

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

Rooki@lemmy.world

L3s@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

578

Google is requiring mandatory developer verification for all Android apps in 2026 (keepandroidopen.org)

submitted 17 hours ago by TheTearMiser@lemmy.world to c/android@lemmy.world

126 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you haven't seen this yet, Google is planning to require mandatory developer identity verification for all Android apps, including apps distributed outside the Play Store, taking effect September 2026. This affects every independent and open source Android developer directly.

This is not just about the Play Store. After September 2026, on any certified Android device, applications from unverified developers will be blocked by default. The only proposed bypass, the "advanced flow", exists only as a blog post and has not appeared in any beta, dev preview, or canary release. No one outside Google has seen it.

The community has been fighting back at keepandroidopen.org:

Read the full breakdown of what this means
Sign the open letter (organisations only)
Contact your national regulators — contacts listed by country on the site
Add the countdown banner to your project

September 2026 is closer than it looks. The time to push back is now.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Zink@programming.dev 12 points 6 hours ago

The whole tech world is just so frustrating. (in before reply pointing out that it's capitalism causing the frustration - yup)

Some of these "features" and "safeguards" might make sense coming from a trusted entity. Even in the real world with evil Google the changes might help some users who use Google everything and might benefit from being blocked from doing stupid things.

But it's not even close to worth it. They cannot be trusted on their own, and now the influence and access of the US government seems 10x worse than it already was.