Microblog Memes

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.