If you haven’t seen this yet, Google is planning to require mandatory developer identity verification for all Android apps, including apps distributed outside the Play Store, taking effect September 2026. This affects every independent and open source Android developer directly.
This is not just about the Play Store. After September 2026, on any certified Android device, applications from unverified developers will be blocked by default. The only proposed bypass, the “advanced flow”, exists only as a blog post and has not appeared in any beta, dev preview, or canary release. No one outside Google has seen it.
The community has been fighting back at keepandroidopen.org:
- Read the full breakdown of what this means
- Sign the open letter (organisations only)
- Contact your national regulators — contacts listed by country on the site
- Add the countdown banner to your project
September 2026 is closer than it looks. The time to push back is now.
This is what happens when you don’t have strong competitors. We need to promote more independent OS platforms for smartphones like Linux distros.
AKA: Don’t waste time and energy fighting google, spend it helping GNU phones.
Which GNU project are you buying from/supporting?
Both are important.
Legal cases create precedents which can be used to fight similar cases in the future.
In bizarre legislation systems like the US and the UK if I understand it correctly. I hope the EU will find some non BS thing to do stopping this crap.
And that graphene os will come to good cheap phones 😬
I expect the opposite but hope I’m wrong.
Every single time competitor appeared, they were ignored. Blackberry, Symbian, Windows 8/Mobile.
Microsoft even tried throwing money at app developers to bridge the biggest gap aka apps, but most companies didn’t even want their money, perceiving porting as too troublesome.
What? BlackBerry was ignored? BlackBerry existed before Android and iOS. It was Android and iOS that killed BlackBerry.
It’s actually a shame, because Windows Phone was actually good. It featured a much more user/task-centric UI, letting users think about what they want to do, rather than which app they need to use to do it. Of course, this was bad for apps’ ability to gain and reinforce brand recognition. So of course they didn’t want to support it.
Honestly this, I thought the windows phone was really good. That said I’ll never forgive Microsoft for buying nokia and effectively killing Meego (yes I know sailfish is a thing but it’s pretty stunted growth wise)
I was a windows phone user and the last Windows version is to blame for killing their phones. They released a half baked platform that literally required SOAP for all network traffic. No raw TCP or UDP access just SOAP… a horrible standard based on XML with like 10x the overhead. 6.1 was probably the best but even that was plagued by compatibility issues.
have you read the process - it’s all about anti scam which is a billion dollar industry right now
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html
We are taking about Google. The US tech company that works with the US government(which is rotted to the core now). No matter how noble the reasons they will tell you for this actions, this identity verification will be used for surveillance and control of personal life. This is basically the same thing as with child safety now.