this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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This is silly. Google doesn't give a single fuck. This decision will make money for key players and that's the end of the conversation.
I dunno, I'm sure there's a part of them that doesn't want to scare off all the free labor they get from the community developers. They are probably legitimately trying to gauge how much of an impact on that this will have. That doesn't mean they are going to stop or change anything, but they probably genuinely care enough to know.
This is the exact same argument the Hackintosh community had. "Apple will never put a stop to us, we're the hardcore tinkerers who find bugs in their software before any normal user!"
Google doesn't care. The hardcore users on the bleeding edge make up 0.001% of people with an Android phone. Pissing them off will not affect the shareholders.
Google’s thinking has gone short term “next quarter must go up.” They would absolutely trash their Android dev community for a quick buck, 100%.
It's very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.
Their AI will be looking over all of the responses, not people. No important person at Google’s time will be wasted on this.
That's why keywords are important. For instance I added the fact that if they continue in this course I will seek to de-Google my phones.
Like I said in another comment, unless they get tens of millions of actual unique-not-spam responses they will not even consider reconsidering. People aren’t going to de-google in any great numbers from this, because most of the people this will affect are already de-googled.
But that makes no sense - they’ll go to someone who is even more restrictive in side loading?
Google won’t reverse this because there’s no alternative for the relatively few people this will affect. They already don’t use Google things, and Apple don’t accomodate them. They’ve got them by the balls and they know it, which is why it’s all just empty threats even from people in here.
The type of people crying over this are not moving to iPhones lol. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Google know it, which is why they know they can do this with no issue.
Side loading isn’t going away, just “anonymous” side loading. I suspect it will end up being a non-issue anyway, as simply registering as a developer through their portal so you can have your app be side loaded isn’t a big deal unless your app is doing something nefarious.
I’m not “defending” anything, let alone Google. All I'm doing is being realistic. The tiny minority of people this will affect have no alternative, and this change is likely to make very little actual change to those people anyway.
No humans are involved in reviewing these. They go into the memory hole and that's that.
Assigned to: Some Indiandude (xWF)
Doesnt matter.
Give feedback and pray it somehow does something!
You do it for posterity reasons