Personally, it’s not Google’s place to dictate how an app verification ecosystem works. If a company has developed an app, they need to be the ones to make sure it’s secure in the first place, not trusting a monopolist tech company that has almost all control with how someone uses their phone.

Google has rules yes, but Android is open-source and should be open with a free & open market for apps. After all, we paid for the device.

You’ve always been able to side load apps you are correct.

However, this is not what Google wants. Over the years, Google has started to enforce more restrictions on third-party applications. They’ve been slowly making these options more difficult to find in the settings of certain OEMs. Just because they give you the freedom, doesn’t always mean they care.

But yes you are correct that Apples monopoly on their app store is way worse. But Google would absolutely remove more user choice settings if certain things like the GPL didn’t stand in the way of the Android OS.

If Android had never been open-sourced, they would absolutely not have any options for third party installations mark my words.

They only thing standing in their way is Linux and the GPL.

Google is just as malicious as Apple. They are just better at hiding it.

I sent the FTC a letter asking them to look into the practices of bootloader locking. They did they they would consider looking into it

Ublock origin + Firefox works and if you’re on android there’s YouTube Revanced

Nintendo is one of the worst companies that always want to set an “example” about the DMCA. They don’t realize they are fighting a battle they cannot win. Emulators are perfectly legal as long as the emulators don’t contain any code that was in ownership from them.

That being said, I’m betting some of those forks were following the DMCA but Nintendo still shut them down. This is where copyright needs to be reevaluated.

I’m honestly not surprised they haven’t gone after dolphin emulator since those devs contain the encryption keys to play the iso files.

I was talking to a friend the other about about this. He said he loves the Android OS. He said imagining putting Linux on it and I couldn’t help but laugh. His eyes widened when I told him what Android really was

Don’t give them any ideas. They are watching the forums 😂

Not only it’s a nightmare but also invasive. I don’t want Google Play scanning my apps constantly. Play protect has proven time and time again to not be very effective at stopping malicious apps. Turn that shit off.

Call me a control freak but what I usually do is update my apps, turn off internet access to the Google play store and only grant internet access back to it when I decide I want to update my apps.

Ads being flooded was expected to happen. It was only a matter of when they were going to start bloating the play store.

Remember, companies don’t care about YOU. They are only there to make profit.