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Google have their own reasons too. They would love to kill off YouTube ReVanced and other haxx0red clients that give features for free which Google would rather
by Lammy 11mo ago
Google have their own reasons too. They would love to kill off YouTube ReVanced and other haxx0red clients that give features for free which Google would rather sell you on subscription.
Just look at everything they've done to break yt-dlp over and over again. In fact their newest countermeasure is a frontpage story right beside this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45898407
- charcircuit 11mo agoYou would still be able to adb installs them. They wouldn't die.
- AuthError 11mo agohow many people ll do this though? i would expect sub 1% conversion from existing users if they had to do that
- gblargg 11mo agoSomehow I think having to use ADB instead of something like F-Droid with automatic updates would put a damper on things.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- gdulli 11mo agoDevelopers of these apps would have little motivation if the maximum audience size was cut down to the very few who would use adb. The ecosystem would die.
- userbinator 11mo agoOr someone comes up with an easy adb wrapper and now it becomes the go-to way to install apps.
- xyzzy_plugh 11mo agoShizuku[0][1] already exists, it would certainly suck but it wouldn't be the end of the world. Of course I would be much happier if I didn't need to use Shizuku in the first place. [0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moe.shizuku.privileged.api https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=moe.shizuku.pr... [1]: https://shizuku.rikka.app/ https://shizuku.rikka.app/
- celsoazevedo 11mo agoThat uses a workaround based on WiFi debugging even though it's all local. It doesn't run if you're not connected to a trusted WiFi network, you have to set it all up when connecting to a new network, etc. Not only users are not connected to WiFi all the time, but in many developing countries people often have no WiFi at home and rely on mobile data instead. It's a solution, but not a solution for everyone or a solution that works all the time.
- wolvesechoes 11mo agoAnd how do you estimate the audience that even cares about those issues? I think number of people caring about alternative app stores, F-droid or whatever is very similar to the number of people willing to use adb if necessary, so rather small.
- gdulli 11mo agoBut the ecosystem exists, regardless of what the absolute number is, and it would be bad to lose it. If the platform was more open like Windows the ecosystem would grow, if it was less open like iOS it would die.
- Aurornis 11mo agoYou’re still proving the point above, which is ignoring the fact that the restriction is specifically targeted at a small number of countries. Google is also rolling out processes for advanced users to install apps. It’s all in the linked post (which apparently isn’t being read by the people injecting their own assumptions) Google is not rolling this out to protect against YouTube ReVanced but only in a small number of countries. That’s an illogical conclusion to draw from the facts.
- unsungNovelty 11mo agoIts my device. Not google's. Imagine telling you which NPM/PIP packages you can install from your terminal. Also, its not SIDE loading. Its installing an app.
- freefaler 11mo agoWell... it would be good if this was true, but read the ToS and it looks more like a licence to use than "ownership" sadly :(
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago"Android" is really a lot of different code but most of it is the Apache license or the GPL. Google Play has its own ToS, but why should that have to do with anything when you're not using it?
- johnnyanmac 11mo agoGoogle doesn't own AOSP. We don't need any google apps on an andoid phone for it to function.
- xnx 11mo agoI agree, but I don't see why Google gets more critical attention than the iPhone or Xbox.
- _blk 11mo ago
- svat 11mo agoI can easily believe that Google's YouTube team would love to kill off such apps, if they can make a significant (say ≥1%) impact on revenue. (After all, being able to make money from views is an actual part of the YouTube product features that they promise to “creators”, which would be undermined if they made it too easy to circumvent.) But having seen how things work at large companies including Google, I find it less likely for Google's Android team to be allocating resources or making major policy decisions by considering the YouTube team. :-) (Of course if Android happened to make a change that negatively affected YouTube revenue, things may get escalated and the change may get rolled back as in the infamous Chrome-vs-Ads case, but those situations are very rare.) Taking their explanation at face value (their anti-malware team couldn't keep up: bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly. It becomes an endless game of whack-a-mole. Verification changes the math by forcing them to use a real identity) seems justified in this case. My point though was that whatever the ultimate stable equilibrium becomes, it will be one in which the set of apps that the average person can easily install is limited in some way — I think Google's proposed solution here (hobbyists can make apps having not many users, and “experienced users” can opt out of the security measures) is actually a “least bad” compromise, but still not a happy outcome for those who would like a world where anyone can write apps that anyone can install.
- Zak 11mo agoI would like a world where buying something means you get final say over how it operates even if you might do something dangerous/harmful/illegal.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- miki123211 11mo agoI would like a world where I have the final say over whether I should have a final say. One way to achieve this is to only allow sideloading in "developer mode", which could only be activated from the setup / onboarding screen. That way, power users who know they'll want to sideload could still sideload. The rest could enjoy the benefits of an ecosystem where somebody more competent than their 80-year-old nontechnical self can worry about cybersecurity. Another way to do this would be to enforce a 48-hour cooldown on enabling sideloading, perhaps waived if enabled within 48 hrs of device setup. This would be enough time for most people to literally "cool off" and realize they're being scammed, while not much of an obstacle for power users.
- ashleyn 11mo agoyt-dlp's days are fairly numbered as Google has a trump card they can eventually deploy: all content is gated behind DRM. IIRC the only reason YouTube content is not yet served exclusively through DRM is to maintain compatibility with older hardware like smart TVs.
- potwinkle 11mo agoAll levels of Widevine are cracked, but only the software-exclusive vulnerabilities are publicly available. It's only used for valuable content though (netflix/disney+/primevideo), so it might still work out for YouTube as no one will want to waste a vulnerability on a Mr. Beast slop video.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo agoThe reason they have different levels is that the DRM pitchmen got tired of everyone making fun of their ineffective snake oil, so they tried to make a version that was harder to break at the cost of not supporting most devices. Naturally that got broken too, and even worse, broken when it's only supported by a minority of devices and content, because the more devices and content it's used for the easier it is to break and the larger the incentive to do it. If you tried to require that for all content then it would have to be supported by all devices, including the bargain bin e-waste with derelict security, and what do you expect to happen then?
- darkwater 11mo agoDo you have any link? All the things I can find are about the 2019 L3 crack
- kotaKat 11mo agoI don’t have any personal links but know that there is a constant cat-and-mouse game of cracking Widevine devices for their L1 keyboxes and using them on high-value content (as mentioned). That’s why a lot of low end Android devices often have problems playing DRMed content on the Web: their keyboxes got cracked open and leaked wide enough for piracy that they got revoked and downgraded down to L3.
- khannn 11mo agoToo bad that I'm going iPhone if Google removes sideloading and now I know about revanced so they aren't getting any more than the zero dollars that youtube and youtube music are worth from me If I'm going to live in a walled garden it's going to the fanciest
- m4rtink 11mo agoI still don't get this mindset - all is lost, I am not going to do anything aboit that AND I will punish them by going with the even worse option!
- Perz1val 11mo agoIf neither does what you want, you'll use other metrics, which often make ios a better choice. Simple as that
- khannn 11mo agoIf they're going to reduce me to a user, iOS is the better choice. I had an iPhone before and it's a picture taking, instagram, social media machine with iMessage—bringing the console wars to normies since inception. Because the hardware is so constrained an iphone lasts forever compared to a similar android. My two year old pixel is slow now, but I know people completely happy with a five year old iphone. Pause, I checked and the oldest iphone that receives updates is an iphone 11, which is the exact model I had before going back to android.
- akimbostrawman 11mo agoI have multiple generations of pixel phones and could not tell the difference in performance between them in basic tasks. Maybe because i installed GrapheneOS which makes both stock android and ios feel like a bloat and spyware riddled toy.
- khannn 11mo ago