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>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is no

>Android's openness was never just a feature. It was the promise that distinguished it from iPhone. Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Google is now revoking that promise unilaterally, on devices already in people's pockets, because they've decided they have enough market dominance and regulatory capture to get away with it. This is why I've stuck with Android for the past 15 years.

tjpnz 6mo ago
There's no point anymore.
- gdulli 6mo ago
  There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading. In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this. And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.
  - tombert 6mo ago
    You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years. Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps. To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that. With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.
  - at-fates-hands 6mo ago
    From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order. I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.
    - at-fates-hands 6mo ago
      [flagged]
criddell 6mo ago
For you, is the openness of Android appealing as a matter of principle or does it enable you to do things you couldn't otherwise do?
- surgical_fire 6mo ago
  Yes.
  - criddell 6mo ago
    Can you expand on that? I'd like to understand the kinds of things millions of people are no longer going to be able to do.
    - gpm 6mo ago
      Well for instance the top app on fdroid is apparently "simpmusic" which would be impossible to run on an iphone because apple doesn't allow apps like it [1]... and it has 800k downloads from f-droid by itself. To be clear though android isn't stooping to Apple levels yet. You can still do anything, it just makes it obnoxious to do so. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/musi-strikes-back-defending-claim-apple-conspired-with-youtube-music-industry/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/musi-strikes-bac...
- zeta0134 6mo ago
  I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other. So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance. In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)
gowld 6mo ago
> Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Millions? Are you sure? Even so, Android has billions of users who want secure app management by default.
- JoshTriplett 6mo ago
  Don't buy the FUD claiming this is about "secure app management".
  - akramachamarei 6mo ago
    Just to play devils advocate, the petition is a bit of FUD too, no? I ask as an F-droid user and downloader of unofficial apks. Speaking purely from my own experience, all the side-loaded apps I care about are fungible; I could get them or similar quality equivalents from GPS. With the exception of a 4chan reader, that hasn't been hosted there and likely won't be. I don't mind the 1 day wait too much. I understand political dissidents and those living under authoritarians may have much more concrete Fs and Ds but for me (us?) it's mostly U.
    - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
      > I don't mind the 1 day wait too much. I do. It's my device. And I've been in the position of having to buy a replacement phone in a pinch; having to wait an extra day before having a usable replacement is not acceptable. In terms of apps I might not be able to get from the Play store: - Signal, depending on what country I'm in in the future and whether they've tried to restrict things they can't backdoor. - Vanilla Music, which remains the best music player I've used. (I wish there were an Android version of Quod Libet.) - A fully capable version of Termux. (the Play store currently has a less capable version that's maintained separately, which could go away if someone decides to stop putting up with it). - Syncthing-Fork, which has at times been undermaintained in the Play store.
      - akramachamarei 6mo ago
        I'm gonna try out Vanilla Music now. FWIW I use Musicolet from GPS and it's quite nice. I hope to learn whether and how our criteria intersect by exploring Vanilla.... Update: out of the box it seems to be reading tags strangely. Maybe I could fix this studying the settings more, but I'd say you have an upgrade opportunity switching off Vanilla. Signal is hard to replace though.
stuaxo 6mo ago
Same
kuhsaft 6mo ago
This is a very HN view of Android. The "openness" of Android was for mobile device manufacturers, not app developers and end-users. Android's prominence was driven by the myriad of low-cost Android devices by multiple device manufacturers, whereas iOS is only available via iPhones. The vast majority of users don't care about "openness" of the OS. They care about the utility of their phone in everyday life. Can I access digital payment systems, social media apps, and entertainment apps? How's the camera on the phone? How big is the screen? Is it waterproof? How expensive is it? These are the questions the majority of phone buyers care about. Not, can I download an app off of a random website and install it? --- I would say that the majority of developers don't care about the "openness" either. They care about accessing a wide audience and getting revenue from their work. Free apps without ads or in-app purchases (zero-revenue apps) are the minority. Google is also fine with losing the zero-revenue app developers because they provide no value for Google. Actually, they are probably a loss for Google, since Google provides Google Play Services.
- functionmouse 6mo ago
  nah it was considered more open for users.
  - kuhsaft 6mo ago
    This is the initial press release for the Open Handset Alliance, the collaborators for the creation of Android: https://web.archive.org/web/20260420021444/https://www.openhandsetalliance.com/press_110507.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260420021444/https://www.openh... Nowhere is their goal to allow users complete control of their device. Android was built as an open-OS for the mobile device industry, not end-users. Android might have been considered more open than other mobile OSes by users, but it was never a promise or goal.
    - Worf 6mo ago
      > Nowhere is their goal to allow users complete control of their device. Android was built as an open-OS for the mobile device industry, not end-users. The fact that having root access is not the default supports that. Without root we're just "consumers" and that's how they see us. There's a lot of discussion about the security model of Android and how root is bad. But we've come to the point to argue that having root access is not only less secure but that we don't need root at all. A lot of replies, even on HN, are like: > Why would you even need root access? What is it you're trying to accomplish? That's a much bigger security smokescreen than the one in TFA. Sure, having root may be dangerous, especially if you don't know what you're doing, but it's still a choice. Having no phone or doing banking IRL or not downloading apps from the Play Store you haven't heard of before would also be more secure. But these 3 options don't align to the financial gain the consumers would bring to the providers. The consumers having no root, on the other hand, benefits the providers.
shye 6mo ago
> Millions chose Android for exactly that reason Citation needed. But even if millions did bought an Android phone for ill-defined defined, about 15 billion Android phones were sold over the years, which could very well make those millions a minority, with most having other reasons for their purchase.
leke 6mo ago
This is going to make it more difficult for non-open source projects to get a foothold in the future because people are not going to trust a promise any more. Like, I have this thing called a smart phone. Is it open source? No? Oh well.
- akho 6mo ago
  That would be good, but somehow didn't work all the other times.

tjpnz 6mo ago

There's no point anymore.

gdulli 6mo ago
There is still a point to making a choice. Inconvenient sideloading is still better than no sideloading. In principle I could never reward Apple with my business for having originated and normalized this. And pragmatically, I'd like to hold on for as long as I can to the next set of rights that Apple will take away five years before Google does.
- tombert 6mo ago
  You have been able to sideload on iOS for years; I first did it in 2021 but I think it was earlier than that. You just needed to create a server on a Mac and you could easily load apps on, all without any kind of special jailbreak. When Delta got released on the App Store, that was cool and all, but I wasn't as impressed as others because I had already been playing emulators on my iPhone for years. Was it convenient? No, of course not, but it's been an option for quite awhile; to me the biggest advantage for Android was the fact that it was relatively easy to sideload apps. To be clear, I don't like that Google is doing this, and I think arguing that it's for security is a half-truth at best. I could make my phone 100% "secure" by pounding a nail through the NAND chip; no one is getting into my phone after that. With the advent of vibe coding, a part of me wonders how hard it would be to hack together my own phone OS with a Raspberry Pi or something and a USB SIM card reader. Realistically probably too much work for me, but a man can dream.
- at-fates-hands 6mo ago
  From what I can tell, Graphene OS will be unaffected. Some of the app stores like Aurora and F-Droid may run into problems during the verification process. Best I can tell (and read from other sources) is an inconvenient 24 hour wait period and many have said the Graphene team will overcome that in short order. I would say keep the faith as I'm in the same boat and have made my choice for privacy and control. Giving up everything when it could very well be a minor setback is worth holding the line.
  - at-fates-hands 6mo ago
    [flagged]

criddell 6mo ago

For you, is the openness of Android appealing as a matter of principle or does it enable you to do things you couldn't otherwise do?

surgical_fire 6mo ago
Yes.
- criddell 6mo ago
  Can you expand on that? I'd like to understand the kinds of things millions of people are no longer going to be able to do.
  - gpm 6mo ago
    Well for instance the top app on fdroid is apparently "simpmusic" which would be impossible to run on an iphone because apple doesn't allow apps like it [1]... and it has 800k downloads from f-droid by itself. To be clear though android isn't stooping to Apple levels yet. You can still do anything, it just makes it obnoxious to do so. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/musi-strikes-back-defending-claim-apple-conspired-with-youtube-music-industry/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/05/musi-strikes-bac...
zeta0134 6mo ago
I'll chime in with a really basic example. On my Android phone, I can have syncthing run as a background task. I can point other applications to use a data folder, in my syncthing share, and store their persistent state there. The Camera app, for example. Or Obsidian, my current favorite note taking app. Syncthing, by virtue of being always on and manipulating a decades old, very well understood filesystem concept, "magically" syncs all of these changes to every other device I own. Entirely offline, even if the internet is out, because the devices can just talk to each other. So far, I have been utterly incapable of getting my iPad to do anything remotely similar. It can run syncthing, technically, but not in the background. Apps don't have a shared filesystem structure, so it's difficult to get anything else set up to "save within my shared folder" in a way that would work, and that disregards that the syncing cannot occur when anything else is open. There's all sorts of cloud backup options, but those require the internet and even when they're working, there's this awkward import/export flow that adds friction to the whole dance. In isolation this would just be a small papercut, I guess, but these sorts of limitations are all over iOS. It's just terribly hostile to anyone not fully committed to the Cloud-first, Apple-hardware ecosystem. Android doesn't care, and doesn't have to care, because it lets me run the software I want. It's a really small set of programs too, at the end of the day. (Firefox with real extensions is the other one.)

gowld 6mo ago

> Millions chose Android for exactly that reason. Millions? Are you sure? Even so, Android has billions of users who want secure app management by default.

JoshTriplett 6mo ago
Don't buy the FUD claiming this is about "secure app management".
- akramachamarei 6mo ago
  Just to play devils advocate, the petition is a bit of FUD too, no? I ask as an F-droid user and downloader of unofficial apks. Speaking purely from my own experience, all the side-loaded apps I care about are fungible; I could get them or similar quality equivalents from GPS. With the exception of a 4chan reader, that hasn't been hosted there and likely won't be. I don't mind the 1 day wait too much. I understand political dissidents and those living under authoritarians may have much more concrete Fs and Ds but for me (us?) it's mostly U.
  - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
    > I don't mind the 1 day wait too much. I do. It's my device. And I've been in the position of having to buy a replacement phone in a pinch; having to wait an extra day before having a usable replacement is not acceptable. In terms of apps I might not be able to get from the Play store: - Signal, depending on what country I'm in in the future and whether they've tried to restrict things they can't backdoor. - Vanilla Music, which remains the best music player I've used. (I wish there were an Android version of Quod Libet.) - A fully capable version of Termux. (the Play store currently has a less capable version that's maintained separately, which could go away if someone decides to stop putting up with it). - Syncthing-Fork, which has at times been undermaintained in the Play store.
    - akramachamarei 6mo ago
      I'm gonna try out Vanilla Music now. FWIW I use Musicolet from GPS and it's quite nice. I hope to learn whether and how our criteria intersect by exploring Vanilla.... Update: out of the box it seems to be reading tags strangely. Maybe I could fix this studying the settings more, but I'd say you have an upgrade opportunity switching off Vanilla. Signal is hard to replace though.

stuaxo 6mo ago

Same

kuhsaft 6mo ago

This is a very HN view of Android. The "openness" of Android was for mobile device manufacturers, not app developers and end-users. Android's prominence was driven by the myriad of low-cost Android devices by multiple device manufacturers, whereas iOS is only available via iPhones. The vast majority of users don't care about "openness" of the OS. They care about the utility of their phone in everyday life. Can I access digital payment systems, social media apps, and entertainment apps? How's the camera on the phone? How big is the screen? Is it waterproof? How expensive is it? These are the questions the majority of phone buyers care about. Not, can I download an app off of a random website and install it? --- I would say that the majority of developers don't care about the "openness" either. They care about accessing a wide audience and getting revenue from their work. Free apps without ads or in-app purchases (zero-revenue apps) are the minority. Google is also fine with losing the zero-revenue app developers because they provide no value for Google. Actually, they are probably a loss for Google, since Google provides Google Play Services.

functionmouse 6mo ago
nah it was considered more open for users.
- kuhsaft 6mo ago
  This is the initial press release for the Open Handset Alliance, the collaborators for the creation of Android: https://web.archive.org/web/20260420021444/https://www.openhandsetalliance.com/press_110507.html https://web.archive.org/web/20260420021444/https://www.openh... Nowhere is their goal to allow users complete control of their device. Android was built as an open-OS for the mobile device industry, not end-users. Android might have been considered more open than other mobile OSes by users, but it was never a promise or goal.
  - Worf 6mo ago
    > Nowhere is their goal to allow users complete control of their device. Android was built as an open-OS for the mobile device industry, not end-users. The fact that having root access is not the default supports that. Without root we're just "consumers" and that's how they see us. There's a lot of discussion about the security model of Android and how root is bad. But we've come to the point to argue that having root access is not only less secure but that we don't need root at all. A lot of replies, even on HN, are like: > Why would you even need root access? What is it you're trying to accomplish? That's a much bigger security smokescreen than the one in TFA. Sure, having root may be dangerous, especially if you don't know what you're doing, but it's still a choice. Having no phone or doing banking IRL or not downloading apps from the Play Store you haven't heard of before would also be more secure. But these 3 options don't align to the financial gain the consumers would bring to the providers. The consumers having no root, on the other hand, benefits the providers.

shye 6mo ago

> Millions chose Android for exactly that reason Citation needed. But even if millions did bought an Android phone for ill-defined defined, about 15 billion Android phones were sold over the years, which could very well make those millions a minority, with most having other reasons for their purchase.

leke 6mo ago

This is going to make it more difficult for non-open source projects to get a foothold in the future because people are not going to trust a promise any more. Like, I have this thing called a smart phone. Is it open source? No? Oh well.

akho 6mo ago
That would be good, but somehow didn't work all the other times.