As I have not seen it discussed here and many use Godot to publish on Android:
Here is Google’s announcement for this:
TL/DR:
Google’s Android and Apple are the two main platforms for mobile computing. While Apple has been closing up their ecosystem from the get-go, Android was traditionally the “open” platform. If you want to publish for anything Apple, you have to pay 100$ each year and go through their publishing pipeline. For Android there of course is the Play Store, but everybody can simply upload something to any free, alternative front or even just the web and go. Google wants to change that now, practically eliminate any way into Android outside of the Play Store. Connected to a fee, of course.
Personally, I strongly stand against that. Androids open, free to tinker approach was the reason I started learning to code and switched from being happy in the walled garden of Apple during the whole of my twenties to the free-knowledge movement a few years ago. Android got me out and interested in self hosting, open source and self reliance. And got me to think about cyber security to actually help me not be scammed.
I hope, everybody takes a few minutes to read about this and maybe sign the petition and spread the word.
If you’re a solo dev and want to publish something on the PlayStore, Google doxxes you. Non negotiable.
Go to any app on the store, there is a “App support” thing on the side, and it displays the full name and address of whomever is the holder of the dev account.
I understand it for a company, you’d give the company address anyway, but if you are registered as “auto-entreprise” or something similar, they want the address of where you live.
Android has too many commercials. It’s just ridiculous, and they hide the close buttons so it takes longer to find. I’m sick of it. They have ruined the entire platform. I’ve got a few games where the commercials haven’t gotten so long and convoluted that the game is still worth playing anymore. It’s really just a place for banking apps and such. Very sad and I don’t care unless Google is going to standardize commercials and make it plain how to close. If they do that, I’m all for it.
It’s not too surprising, the concerns about safety are valid to say the least… there are a LOT of personal Android devices out there. APK’s can still be sideloaded, and it’s not like a solo developer can’t still have a presence in the Play store.
With any luck, it’ll clean up some of the endless, ad-driven garbage that’s littering the store currently
It doesn’t sound like the submission process is going to be anywhere near as strict as Apple or Nintendo (two I’ve worked with), who each have a 500-page bible of standards to uphold, and you can pretty much guarantee multiple review cycles.
It’s about who is controlling/owning the hardware. It’s part of a bigger picture to more surveillance. With all the new laws to protect the children worldwide, it looks like there is some plan to stop the anarchy in soft-, hardware and the Web. Now that every computing device has some kind of TPM chip or similar device, all the profiles and activities should be identifiable. Next step will be to ban VPNs and chat apps without backdoor, to read all the communication a.s.o.
That’s not a singular action by google, there is more going on. Adjusting my tinfoil hat…
I know Ubuntu was among the big ones to first support Android phones, thus the smiley.
Doesn’t change the fact that Android is Linux, and not just the kernel. There is a basic distro supporting the various servers/processes/whatever is Android speak these days. Rooting a phone use to be about replacing sudo first of all to get full “root" privileges, etc. After tweaking the bootloader to change the RAM disk used to boot the phone.
Seriously, most of Android is Open Source (not the G apps, for the most part), so the distro you use doesn’t change commercial access to the ecosystem’s store.
In recent years, with the slightly hidden dev options you didn’t have to root your phone to sideload both sketchy and legit apps, you didn’t even need dev options. Rooting is still an option for nearly all Android phones, bar a few locked and encrypted bootloaders that didn’t sell enough for someone skillful enough to find a way to crack or bypass it.
You will be able to sideload apps as a developer, or with a rooted phone.
It’s the store they are really locking down
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have someone take AOSP, fork it and build an app store that is more open yet commercially viable for app and game devs alike, that can push the new bootcode for new SoCs on day 7 at the latest, etc.
Alas, even before the coming changes, Google Play and Apple Store are quite closed ecosystems, the little guy trying not to drown in a sea of shit smelling spammy apps.
I signed the petition in solidarity, I don’t expect the king of the alphabet soup corpo citizens to do anything not driven by the bottom line.
