The future of this elegant and proven system was put in jeopardy last month, when Google unilaterally decreed that Android developers everywhere in the world are going to be required to register centrally with Google. In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents[^regid], including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.
Well maybe companies should make clear concise terms and conditions. No one is reading 30 pages of documentation to use something.
Average is 40 pages. Teams is more than double that
I think pretty much everyone who replied regarding terms and conditions misunderstood what I meat, which leads me to believe I may have communicated poorly. My point is that early news coverage didn’t mention independent apps needing to follow Google terms and conditions.
That’s not just a privacy issue for devs, that’s an issue of Google wanting control over what the apps and actually do, and it changes how severe of a problem this is. I’ve also learned since then that this may mean only the devs can distribute apps(?), which would potentially kill f-droid outside of custom roms (I still don’t fully understand that part but that idea was also not in early coverage)