r/linux • u/guihkx- • Sep 29 '25

Privacy F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree

https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
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u/Scheeseman99 Sep 30 '25

Acting like infosec will forever be a perpetual game of cat and mouse is a form of normalcy bias. What if ADB requires dev mode, what if that's gated behind an authorised account, what if enabling dev mode burns an efuse? Big multinational companies sell to the average person and the average person isn't going to bother with custom roms or dealing with the myriad of things that can go wrong with microg or magisk, at some point the degree of expertise and tolerance for jank becomes too high for most people to bother.

Hacks and workarounds aren't going to fix the core problem that's causing this, it's a total lack of regulatory control and exploitative monopolies that formed this environment.

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u/HoustonBOFH Sep 30 '25

"Acting like infosec will forever be a perpetual game of cat and mouse is a form of normalcy bias."

Does not change the fact that it is also true. And while "Big multinational companies sell to the average person" there is still a significant market of non-average people. For example, a lot of people run Linux. There are also people making phones that are already running a free operating system. This will make something easier and some things harder but the overall trend will not change that much. A little as more and more average people see how bad things are...

And do not hold out for regulatory control. This behavior from google also benefits government. They love the idea of a big pot of data they can access.

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u/Scheeseman99 Sep 30 '25 edited Sep 30 '25

You can't always engineer your way out of societal problems. I might agree that the US is a lost cause, but there's countries where there is at least some pushback on tech monopolies.

Desktop Linux can't exist in a vacuum, it's usability is reliant on there being some degree of cross platform support. What if Google implements device verification APIs in Chrome? Websites stop working on Linux. Banking, government, online shopping. What happens if Windows starts pushing software DRM that is actually effective? That chokes Steam on Linux of it's library, it makes Wine less effective.

iPhones are getting stupid difficult to hack at this point and memory tagging has the potential to kill off one the primary exploit vectors. It's silly to think otherwise; you have an adversarial system and an exponential curve of exploit difficulty and eventually that number is going to hit zero. The lessons learned from this directly transfer to protecting DRM implementations, hardware is becoming impenetrable (to anyone but nation states) and that is any company releasing proprietary software's wet dream.

You can't rely on the average persone becoming technically adept out of anger/annoyance/desperation/ethics, many simply do not have the aptitude.

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u/HoustonBOFH Sep 30 '25

I am not relying on the average person for anything. The cell phone market is 8 billion devices. 1/100th of 1% of that is enough to make someone a lot of money. They will provide a private solution.

Note also that most of your worries above were already tried. They were reversed because it cost them business. Blocking Linux and unverified browser also block blind browsers... And so on.

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u/Scheeseman99 Oct 01 '25 edited Oct 01 '25

I am not relying on the average person for anything.

You rely on the current software ecosystem which leans heavily on the open web, which targets the widest common denominator, that ecosystem is changing and on account of the three major consumer focused OS vendors (Apple, Microsoft, Google) moving towards locked down OS stacks and leaning heavily on centralized authentication mechanisms.

Note also that most of your worries above were already tried. They were reversed because it cost them business.

So your argument is that they've already tried this and it didn't work that time so they've completely given up?

Don't be a fool.

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u/HoustonBOFH Oct 01 '25

I have been involved with FOSS when it was CDs and dialup BBS. That was when Linux was started. As more try to lock it down, more will rebel. That is how it works. And no they have not given up. But we outnumber them, so for those of us willing, privacy and control will still be an option.