In Singapore, lots of boomers are downloading scam apps from facebook lured by promises of discounts and free gifts, handing out accessibility privileges, and they'll even argue vehemently against loved ones and bank staff when confronted. When it all inevitably blows up, they blame absolutely everyone except themselves, including praising Apple for some reason.

Being the largest voting block, they managed to get banks responsible for reimbursing their losses and there was even an idea floated of getting everyone to contribute to a shitty scam insurance fund. Many major banking apps are paranoid af and block usage from simple things like usb debugging turned on.

Absolutely stupidity. And there's nothing we can do about it when the politicians love them so much.

F-Droid uses the same way to install packages as the file manager does.

I'm sorry, but in that case, it wasn't worth running the app to begin with. You can either find a third-party app that lets you access the same content, such as Newpipe and YouTube, or you can use it from a web browser, such as your bank, and if you can't do either of those, then just don't fucking use that service.

I was willing to totally switch banks because my previous bank required me to use a mobile app and I did not want to do so. If I must go through some annoyance to use something that works properly, I will.

For me at least, running as much open source as I can possibly do is worth more than the inconvenience caused by not being able to use these shit services.

Usb debugging is sketchy as shit. You should almost never turn that on, and immediately turn it off once you're finished with whatever it is you're doing with that on.

I use open source whenever I can, but sometimes that just isn't an option in the real world. I work in IT at a hospital that REQUIRES Duo. I use GrapheneOS. I was able to get it to work, but it was a horrible experience.

Aaaaand now I'm carrying around a laptop again, at least mini pcs are tiny now, maybe a small handheld would do...

if any of this shit hinders me, I'll get a dumb phone and the cheapest iphone available for manditory work-based things and say so-long to being a mobile OS user.

The article says it only applied to apps requesting certain permissions. I agree I'm an ideal world it would be nice to get f-droid directly from the Play store but at least according to the article the ability to install it isn't being blocked here.

The restrictions on apk access over the past 10 years have already been an annoying pita. Many of the best power user apks have had to gut themselves over their original functionality, all while obtaining root access over your owned devices has become harder or next to impossible.

I’d be telling them to provide a work phone.

Let them keep those. I hereby declare that if I don't own the thing, I ain't buying it. So no root, no $$$.

Are they talking about the changes that were made that allow a dev to prevent their app from launching if it fails a Play integrity check?

If so I don’t see that as a big deal since it is up to the dev to use it. OSS devs that want to distribute their app via apk download won’t enable it, and anyone distributing cracked apks will just disable that along with whatever other changes they are making.

I haven't seen proper reporting but the Play Integrity install source thing is accurate. There's a reasonably good overview straight from the devil himself.

Lots of things that have very valid reasons on paper that also just happen to give Google a stupid amount of control and will backfire for a somewhat small percentage of people in very bad ways. We've been at "you can't use pretty much any bank unless you agree to either Google or Apple terms" for quite some years now, now we're giving those same app developers ways to detect if their device has accessibility APIs enabled (useful to protect against bot farms, but also a functional check for "you're able-bodied") or is in security support (also a functional check for "not reliant on hand-me-downs").

From the article it sounds like the limitations come for some app types downloaded directly from a browser. I think this doesn't affect alternate app stores like f-droid where you are effectively delegating approval to their process.

I have come across the other limitations mentioned with the Home Assistant companion app which I could only get matter registration to work with the version downloaded from the Play store.

Degoogled ROMs are gonna be the bomb in the future.