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FreeDroidWarn
- kikokikokiko 1y agoA little bit overkill to use a dependency to just show a dialog. I agree that Google ia making Android less and less free with every new release, but show a damn dialog, no need to use this.
- bubbi 1y ago[dead]
- Barbing 1y agoSounds right. Though may aid in spreading the practice if it accumulates stars, goes viral on places like this?
- nagamsreekar 1y ago[dead]
- scotty79 1y agoI think creation of this repo is more of a statement than creation of utility.
- ethersteeds 1y agoI would say it's both a statement and a way to encourage other developers to "speak with one voice". Like handing out printed signs at a protest.
- Kwpolska 1y agoIt's also pretty sloppily coded, with the same code repeated in both branches of the `if`... https://github.com/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn/blob/master/library/src/main/java/org/woheller69/freeDroidWarn/FreeDroidWarn.java https://github.com/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn/blob/master/libr...
- kikokikokiko 1y agoIf it was 2023 I would say someone just vibecoded a trivial android piece of code. But nowadays Android studio comes with Gemini agent integrated, and I doubt it would produce such terrible redundancy on a code so simple.
- Hackbraten 1y agoThe library features localized warnings.
- TheDong 1y ago"Copyright GPL" I don't think this meets the bar for copyrightable code. Copyright protects creative expression. Displaying a single dialogue does not take creative expression, and pretty much any developer given the task would produce code identical to this.
- ronsor 1y agoYes, this code is almost as trivial as a hello world.
- woheller69 1y agoYeah, I just wanted to have something I can add with a line of code to my 20+ apps on F-Droid including all translations. It is Apache now
- croemer 1y agoDon't complain about the license. The license removes any doubt. You can happily use it without having to worry. If there was no license you'd have uncertainty. Also you're misquoting. The license is GPL-3, not AGPL.
- TheDong 1y agoI'm not complaining about the license, I'm complaining about the library size. Something that is too small to be considered creative should be a documented example you copy and adopt into your app, not a dependency. The only exceptions to this are things like "A dependency that contains all unicode planes and categorizes characters", which isn't creative, but is useful and too large to copy-paste, and also updates over time. Or the timezone database file, another case of something that should be "public domain" knowledge (uncopyrightable), but makes sense as a dependency. This is not that sort of thing.
- croemer 1y agoYou can't copy paste all the localizations for example. Go make a copy-pasteable version if it's so easy.
- everyone 1y agogoogle seem to have the multi-pronged attack on android devs going on atm. They are seemingly trying to take down as many apps and dev accounts as possible.. Anyone know why? 1. doxx yourself of they kill your account 2. re-build every app with pointless newer api version literally every year or it gets taken down. 3. Push an update or a new app or they kill your account. .. My guess is enshittification, some random exec is trying to save a few pennies in server and storage costs. .. I'd also say that google makes so much money from ads and data-brokering that everything else they do is not vital for their survival and thus undergoes a sort of "genetic drift" where they just make random decisions.
- tomrod 1y agoGoogle cut off their own revenue legs with AI suggestions instead of ads. Thats okay, they jumped the shark when the imperative for ads took over.
- peddling-brink 1y ago> 1. doxx yourself of they kill your account Combat abuse. I don't think this is a solvable problem, so obviously this won't be a silver bullet. But maybe will it impose more cost on the abusers creating a nicer app store experience for everyone. Or maybe this only imposes cost on the honest ones? I don't know how much validation they do. > 2. re-build every app with pointless newer api version literally every year or it gets taken down. Fix vulns. This also gets rid of abandoned apps. It also probably provides an "opportunity" for the dev to agree to new T&C. > 3. Push an update or a new app or they kill your account. This one seems shakier to me, but it might feed into an effort to get rid of abandoned apps. But I disagree with this being healthy for the ecosystem, if that's actually the reason. I'm not trying to defend google, but from working in FAANG, some of this is obvious. None of these things save a significant amount of server or storage costs. Some of it is clearly anti-abuse and efforts to defend themselves from the constant stream of crap that tries to make its way into the app store. > everything else they do Google isn't like some dude (sundar) making decisions. It's a bunch of millionaires and billionaires making decisions. There's some high level guidance, but the difference between different divisions is 100% based on who's running that particular show.
- camdroidw 1y agoWhat would be my options as an end user who does not want to root his device
- aydyn 1y agoCry in a corner ig?
- zx8080 1y agoMaybe use iphone? There will be not much advantages left on Android side after that shit gets go.
- scotty79 1y agoI might just move to whatever Chinese come up with. By 2027 their tech should be clearly superior in every way.
- silon42 1y agoIf there's a cheap Chinese phone that banks/google accept, that might be my second (non-rooted) phone.
- politelemon 1y agoEven without side loading there are several advantages and freedoms that Android has unmatched.
- littlecranky67 1y agosuch as? Curious, because on iOS you can freely install browser extensions (adblockers like uBlock origin lite) from the get go. Still boggles my mind that Chrome does not allow extensions.
- cyberax 1y ago
- zx8080 1y ago> Add the JitPack repository to your root build.gradle How much MB (kb?) does this dependency add to apk?
- nulld3v 1y agoGiven that it's just a couple lines of code and has no other dependencies other than AppCompat (which nearly all apps already use), the increase in size would be negligible (<4KB). EDIT: The AAR file is 26KB: https://jitpack.io/com/github/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn/V1.3/FreeDroidWarn-V1.3.aar https://jitpack.io/com/github/woheller69/FreeDroidWarn/V1.3/... But most of it looks to be from R.txt and I think that file gets deduped/compressed during app packaging?
- zx8080 1y agoThis story with restricting users is a similar one to Manifest V3 in Chromium. But we don't have anything like FF as an alternative to go from Android. Especially considering banks require "certified OS".
- scotty79 1y agoWhat about GrapheneOS?
- zx8080 1y agoIs it a joke? Have you seen the list of supported devices? https://grapheneos.org/releases https://grapheneos.org/releases (Pixels only)
- falcor84 1y agoIs there anything about GrapheneOS that limits it to only Pixel devices, or was it just a prioritization decision?
- codethief 1y agohttps://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
- nunobrito 1y agoIt is sus as heck and just about everyone in cybersec was complaining about that weird decision. Go for Calyx or any other android distro, they have zero difficulties in supporting more devices.
- ghgr 1y agoSerious question: can you point out some serious complaints? They seem to have an exhaustive justification for their reasons to only support Pixels, see https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices https://grapheneos.org/faq#future-devices
- Krasnol 1y agoWouldn't it be nice if, in this time of feeding our IDs to the machine, there would be someone who would also offer some nice and easy way to identify ourselves digitally? Maybe someone who sits on all that unverified advertisement tracking data already and somebody who has an AI agent to feed? I'm sure everybody would profit from that... https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-identity-verifications/ https://blog.google/products/google-pay/google-wallet-age-id...
- politelemon 1y agoFascinating that the same company producing zero knowledge proof implementation didn't think to use it for the purpose they mention here. Do these departments not talk to each other?
- rippeltippel 1y agoIt's Google we're talking about. Likely the left hand has no idea of what the right hand is doing. And it's got far more than two hands.
- IshKebab 1y agoWhat property would they prove? The whole point (supposedly anyway) is they know your actual identity in case you publish malware.
- stein1946 1y agoAgain, technological measures against this kind of attacks on ownership rights fall short and are probably what conglomerates want since it keeps the tech people busy in a self-satisfying "fight" against the big corporation. You need legislation.
- ajb 1y agoThis. You can have a popup, but it must have a call-to-action. Explain to users how to fight this.
- that_guy_iain 1y agoIt's open source... We don't need legislation; you are free to do whatever you want, and open source provides those freedoms. You just want it to be the way you want it instead of it being the way that benefits the most people. This "fight" will always be lost, because the other side is 99% of the population and they want to stop scammers more than they want to enable you to publish software to a personal tracking device anonymously...
- cubefox 1y ago99% of the population doesn't fall for scam apps outside the Play Store. They don't want to stop app scammers, because they don't have any issue with them. It's only a small minority which does, and which is supposed to justify the new restrictions in Android.
- that_guy_iain 1y ago[flagged]
- cubefox 1y agoThe scams are also edge cases. Some people will always be stupid enough to hurt themselves with a a 99% safe system.
- maxlin 1y agoBased. I wonder how badly Google's shenanigans will affect sales of new Android devices too. I've been looking to buy a foldable at some point, but I'll have to make entirely sure it won't be of an effectively broken (too new) Android version.
- ChocolateGod 1y agoI doubt then locking down side loading will make more than 1% difference. Most people just don't care.
- flykespice 1y agoThis. The average don't even know what sideloading is. Hence they are comfortable making this overreaching decision.
- littlecranky67 1y agoWell what is the alternative? Apple does the very same, even in the EU.
- wiseowise 1y agoThe single most prevailing argument for Android was always “sideloading”. “You want sideload on Apple? Go buy an Android” I see this change as win, personally. a) it will finally shut the fuck up braindead sideload, Apple bootlicking, haters b) EU can go after both Google and Apple to allow sideloading (one can only dream!) Win-win.
- surajrmal 1y agoIt's not the same because Google still allows you to load apps for free. Apple forces you to pay a yearly subscription.
- ducktective 1y agoDidn't Google say that they're gonna provide an escape hatch for students and hobbyists? So, best case scenario, we just need to tap some label 5 times to enable side-loading again.
- charcircuit 1y agoYou are able to get a limited number of app installs for your package for free. https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/android-developer-console https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/...
- rcxdude 1y agoWhich still requires ID verification.
- surajrmal 1y agoHow many people would that really stop? It wouldn't stop me from feeling comfortable with creating android apps that are capable of being side loaded.
- Y_Y 1y ago> You'll need > Your legal name and address. These need to be verified by uploading official identity documents. I don't have a "legal name". Sounds like some sovcit bullshit. I go by several names, none of which is canonical. Maybe other countries formalize this idea, but the countries where I am a citizen/resident do not. > A private email address and phone number for Google to contact you. These will need to be verified using a one-time password I love that email OTP is good enough for this, but apparently not for anything else, where I'll need an approved verified secure attested super official app.
- charcircuit 1y ago>I don't have a "legal name". Sounds like some sovcit bullshit. Considering every country has passports and passports all have the person's legal name on them. And thst the passport standard only supports having one name with a primary and secondary identifier. You must be mistaken.
- debugnik 1y ago> This library is licensed under the GPLv3. If the intention was to make it easier to spread the word, you've already failed. Anyway, this whole library should have been a copy-pastable snippet for a dialog or toast (what's with the duplicate code?); the only value added is the translation, which most app devs already have a pipeline for. The code part is so trivial that I suspect it doesn't even meet the legal bar for copyright protection in many jurisdictions.
- silverliver 1y agoOP, I recommend switching to the LGPLv3. It ensures users remain in control over your part of the code while avoiding this type of reaction.
- debugnik 1y agoNot really, it would have maybe avoided the first paragraph. I actually really like copyleft, but I assume the social statement here is more important than the code, thus making it easier to rally around it should be the priority. A CC0 copy-pastable snippet, plus maybe this helper library with a permissive licence. The only way this would go popular is through slacktivism, so you need to remove any friction.
- lptome 1y agoYeah this is very npm i is-even
- rollcat 1y ago> Anyway, this whole library should have been a copy-pastable snippet for a dialog or toast People under-value copy-pasting. I'd rather copy/vendor a thousand lines of code (with license+credit intact) than add it as a dependency. I'm working on a side project, and needed a CPIO library for Go. CPIO is a fixed thing, a good implementation is "done". U-root[1] has a really decent implementation, so I've vendored 2500+ lines of code, as otherwise I'd have to (indirectly) depend on almost 700.000. Great value. [1]: https://github.com/u-root/u-root https://github.com/u-root/u-root
- 1y ago
- Tade0 1y agoAll this has me wondering: what's the future of chroot-based tools like proot-distro? No app store here, just PPAs. Can largely run whatever the hell I want, provided it's distributed for the OS I'm currently running.
- charcircuit 1y agoThe future I see is that it gets rearchitected such that each app will correspond to an android app that way it follows the Android model properly. The current model of shoving everything into the same app is going to continually run into problems and is not the right way to do it long term. So essentially there will be a tool to easily convert a freedesktop Linux application to an android one. In regards to this new package name registration whoever is running the repo of such packages would register a new package name for each app.
- RobertEva 1y agoNice timing. I’d probably just ship a simple in-app dialog instead of a whole dep, but the message matters. For non-root users, will ADB + “Unknown sources” remain the escape hatch once the new checks roll out?
- generalpf 1y agoYou don't need this library, it's just an `AlertDialog` wrapper with a check in `SharedPreferences`. It's not particularly well-written.
- tempodox 1y ago> Google has announced that, starting in 2026/2027, all apps on certified Android devices will require the developer to submit personal identity details directly to Google. Since the developers of this app do not agree to this requirement, this app will no longer work on certified Android devices after that time. I don’t have any hope that this will sway Google, but at least the users are being warned.
- juliangmp 1y agoIf this library is licensed under GPL, you can't really use it without relicensing your entire project, right?
- woheller69 1y agochanged to Apache V2.0 license
- johannes1234321 1y agoGPLv3 seems like a quite restrictive license for such a project. I would assume they want that note to be spread everywhere and while about user's freedom, the freedom for that code may be less relevant.
- woheller69 1y agochanged to Apache V2.0 license
- hereme888 1y agoRad. That's the way to do it. "Avoid Google. Don't buy Google products, especially their phones." Money is the corporate language, especially for Big Tech, which is always several steps ahead of legislation.
- jeroenhd 1y agoWill corporate care? Google alternatives are either iOS (which has had the same restriction for a decade now so you're not gaining anything by switching) or a super niche OS that isn't going to be profitable in the mass market.
- preisschild 1y ago> "Avoid Google. Don't buy Google products, especially their phones." Ironically their phones are the best way to avoid this shit, because they are one of the few that properly support securely installing de-googled Android Versions.
- hereme888 1y agoAgreed, ironic. I recently switched my Pixel to Graphene
- preisschild 1y agoI was already de-googled before I switched to Pixels, but used LineageOS on chinese devices with a hellish bootloader-unlock experience and wanted better security. I hope the OEM GrapheneOS is in contact with makes a better alternative.