this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
1966 points (99.4% liked)
Microblog Memes
9036 readers
2772 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
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
Why, in the love of all free tech support would I ever want to do that?
I swear, people just don't grasp how normies use computers. I don't want my normie relatives to have me micromanage their devices, I want their devices to be foolproof and do the five things they need to do.
That's not what I want for every device, though, so there needs to be an alternative for people who post on federated social media and performatively use open source software. If there are only two providers in a segment and both lock down all sideloading that's not acceptable, but the concept of locked down devices by itself is not.
This is not such a challenging concept. I am convinced most people in this thread would get it just fine outside of the context of having a knee-jerk reaction to the last thing they read online.
It's an option you have. Personally having to do the same thing for my family, I configure an idiot-proof setup and I don't get random calls from my parents / grandparents.
Blocking sideloading won't help you here either though. You can just leave your mom using Google play store which vets the applications on the store.
You can lock down a device security-wise without locking down a device freedom-wise.
That said, I don't think there ever will be a foolproof device, that's not realistic.
If you want to guarantee someone won't fuck up their device that's what Administration is for. That's what child controls and safety features are for.
Its not that I "don't get it" its that I've been there and done that. And I use the tools given to me to make my life better. Those tools are for managing what my normie grandparents can and can't do, because in reality, they just want to face-time their grandchildren, check emails, and print photos. But they're also targets for scammers.
No, trust me, it's that you don't get it.
What you're describing is an inordinate amount of effort and you clearly don't realize just how much. There are billions of people with billions of devices. People who can "configure an idiot-proof setup" at all are outnumbered many thousands to one.
There isn't a you to configure anything for most people with a mobile phone. That's not how that works. It either works out of the box and forever or it's broken and unusuable.
And sure, locking it down is no guarantee. People can still mess up their Apple phones, and those do like a thing and a half. Less than that without Apple's strict supervision. But this is a matter of degrees. The difference between a few of those thousands of unsupervised normies making a mistake each year and 10% of them making a mistake each year is the difference between Android being a viable platform and it being a broken mess nobody uses.
I feel like I'm weirdly relitigating every other conversation I have with people about Linux over here. It's kind of exhausting.
And to reiterate, that doesn't make Google insisting on having the ID of the author of every piece of software allowed to run on Android acceptable. It's just the difference between a reasonable objection and... not that.
maybe technology is not for everyone. but if grandpa wants to video chat with his kids, maybe it's the responsibility of the kids to help him. set up child limits or deal with the occasional problems. if grandpa cannot determine if an app is safe, they will install plenty of unsafe apps from the play store too, as google play's vetting is not nearly as good as some like to argue, so it's better for them if they just can't do so by themselves.
Nnnno.
Grandpa is not a child. Grandpa is an adult. With, you know, income and independence and a full brain. Grandpa is well within his rights to own appliances that do things grandpa doesn't fully understands but that are useful to Grandpa.
There is value for Grandpa (and for your jock brother that doesn't understand computers, this isn't an age problem) to have access to applications where he pays some company to do a thing for them. Those companies can take some of the complexity out of their hands, and Grandpa should be protected from abusive practices. It's not on Grandpa to do research on technology just to make a phone call now any more than it was for 1960s grandpas.
Yyyyes.
of course. that's out of question. However the tools provided by parental controls is what can solve this problem effectively. It's specifically for the case when the user cannot use the device responsibly for one reason or another. you set parental controls up, and now they can't break their phone.
what is the reason you think the parental controls function is not appropriate for grandpa? does it block him from doing something he should be able to do freely?
I totally agree! And with that, he is well within his rights to break his phone accidentally. the question is not that. the question is whether you want to help him avoid that. with parental controls you can allow him to do everything he needs to do.
Yes. That works if grandpa is willing to ask professionals before (or after) doing something stupid. If that applies, you don't set up parental controls for him, but allow him to do whatever.
If he is not willing to do that, he needs to be barred from breaking his phone. That's why you support google's plan, because they implement that, right?
But the problem is that they implement it ineffectively because they can still install plenty of hot garbage from the play store, and it'll make every other user's lives harder who know at least somewhat what they are doing, plus of those who are willing to give help to relatives any day. Because they either won't be able to install apps that they trust, outside of the play store, or it will come with huge consequences like making google play integrity checks fail, or these apps being restricted in what can they do.
that is why you don't implement such insanity on all phones worldwide, but only individually for those people that need this kindof stronger guidance.
who needs to do research on that? you gave him the phone, it's your job to show him how to place a call. but this point is not even relevant because google's planned limitations wouldn't do anything so that your grandpa can place a call if he doesn't know how to do that.
Hell no, I do not want to help Grandpa avoid anything. I don't want to be part of Grandpa's owning appliances at all in the first place. I have way better things to do with the little time we get to share together in this world.
And again, this hypothetical old person is not a child. I don't "allow" anything in this scenario. And even if I did, and even if I had the time or interest to run IT interference for somebody else, this solution does not scale. For every tech savvy person there are thousands of people who have never read a warning pop-up in full.
Your perception of where the onus is, how much understanding of how computers work or the usefulness of foolproof computing devices is way out of whack. And I get it, it's easy to lose perspective on this. Average familiarity and all that. But you're setting up a scenario that works just for you and not for everybody else.
So no, you are wrong, for a whole range of devices, restrictions should be the default. Absolutely. No question. This isn't even up for debate.
That's, in fact, not what is being debated, seeing how Google aren't changing install restrictions at all. The changes are more insidious and extremely bad for entirely different reasons. It is frustrating that this conversation is both being had on the wrong terms for what Google is actually doing AND showing how much even casual dwellers in tech circles misunderstand how UX needs to work to be serviceable at scale.
then why do you support this thing at all?
restrictions are the default, today and the past few years. but google here wants to make it not a default, but the only option anyone can have.
y.. yes they do?? that's exactly what they are doing!
I don't? I've said multiple times that I don't.
Can somebody tell me what's the minimum guaranteed attention span in people reading stuff online so I can crunch down any points that aren't a binary of "Down with this sort of thing/Up with this sort of thing" to not have people waste my time by knee-jerk assuming my stance without reading what I'm saying? Maybe we need AI summarization more than people say we do.
Also, this is me doing that for Google now. Best I can tell Google isn't stopping sideloading, they are stopping sideloading of unsigned apps in devices with Android security certifications.
The second caveat is irrelevant, in that uncertified devices presumably don't get Google services and the Play Store, so outside off-brand Android retro handhelds it doesn't matter. The first caveat is important, because on paper you can still install stuff from a website or F-Droid or the Samsung store or whatever but those developers will have to leave their info on record.
This isn't the full app certification you need to publish on Play Store, as far as I can tell. In their words
This is very bad for a number of reasons. Just not the reasons people are reporting.
You're right, it is an inordinate amount of effort.
So much effort, that I don't believe doing it on the scale Android / Google would need to do is possible.
We see Google, Apple failing at this insurmountable effort all the time. Even Linux has failed at it sometimes with supply chain attacks.
And frankly I don't feel that Google can do better than what they've done already in terms of sideloading. Right now of you don't want to go through the app store, you have to ignore two separate warnings when you side load a malicious app. At that point it's negligence.
Because of that I don't feel that adding this restriction to sideloading will help the situation. I believe it's a cop out, if anything they should direct the effort to the Play Store more. There is plenty of actually harmful malware on the Play Store that we can see in the news is a much larger impact than sideloading applications.
That's probably why no one is empathizing with what you're asking for, there is too much showing this change is in bad faith.
We did have that impossible to screw up device in feature phones. But we traded that for pocket computers that enable us to install, and build apps.
As for Linux, I completely agree with you. It still needs to improve user friendliness. It's improved exponentially lately, and could be argued to be better than Windows, but it's still not as good as smartphone computers which are the epiphany of user friendliness (and ignoring the dark patterns being added).
For the record, people are misunderstanding what Google is doing. They aren't enforcing full verification of every app, and presumably they're not preventing third party stores, since regulators have already forced their hand on that front.
They are demanding to keep verifiable ID on the authors of every app for the app to be able to launch from any source. Their pitch is not to centralize, which they would like to do but aren't allowed to do, their pitch seems to be to give you a paper trail where you know who made the malware because Google literally has a copy of their ID on file. Microsoft already has this for Windows as a certification system, but crucially on Windows you get a (deliberately very scary) "this app is unsigned and is probably malware" pop up that you can still bypass. It take a lot of unintuitive clicking, but you can still run the software. Google is saying they won't have that workaround at all now on the subset of devices they flag as "Android certified".
In practice this is fairly neutral in terms of security, but it focuses on enforcement and visibility. Besides the very real question of how to even implement this for distributed development or open source applications of the kind that doesn't bother submitting to Google Play, it may also have a heck of a chilling effect on a whole bunch of things you really don't want chilled in terms of privacy and anonimity for developers. It means if you want to control what software can be on ANY phone you need to get to basically three companies across the planet and that's enough. Likewise if you want to go after someone who made a piece of software for whatever reason.
But that's not what the conversation we're having is about, partly because nobody seems to be looking past the headlines, partly because nobody wants to engage with the nuance of the situation and is looking at it from the myopic perspective of principled access at the cost of added complexity when that's not at all what this is about.
I understand the paper trail that this is creating.
But it does come across as Google gatekeeping.
For example, what if I want to build an app, and distribute it outside of app stores with zero involvement from Google? It appears that cannot be done because I'd need to identify with Google through the developer program.
What happens if Google doesn't like that I made a chat app that bypasses censorship in specific country, it gets removed from play store, so i publish it on my website. What if Google gets mad at this and flags my identification?
Suddenly no one can install my app that has nothing to do with Google.
To me, even if it seems like a benign change, I can see how it can be exploited by Google to push whatever agenda they want.
If Google disappeared the day after this is rolled out, would I still be able to add a valid identifier to my apk without Google's involvement?
I don't think it seems like a benign change at all, for those reasons.
Well, for most of them. It IS a concern that every single piece of bootable code on the platform is traceable to a specific person worldwide, for sure. The last one shouldn't be an issue. If Google disappeared you'd still be able to run unsigned code on Android, since on paper this will only apply to "Android certified" devices. Not being certified may remove Google services and the Play Store, but in your scenario those are gone anyway. And there isn't a ton of clarity about whether ID certification will be automatic. I presume it will be, but we won't know until we hear from devs in their early access program.
But apps being persecuted or censored by governments? Sure. That's a very real issue. And Google and Apple deciding what people can run in their devices single-handedly? That's entierly unacceptable.