Google are going to restrict sideloading

Yes, you read that right. Soon, you will not be allowed to install any app onto your own device unless it is from a Google-approved developer. For your own good, and your own safety, of course. After all, with headlines like “224 malicious apps removed from the Google Play Store after ad fraud campaign discovered” and "over 19 million downloads of malware from the Play Store", don't you trust Google to look after your interests? Their processes are so thorough and foolproof that the kind of thing referred to above happens with monotonous regularity. After all, it's not as if they are only looking after their bottom line, no siree!

Well, I don't trust this company any further than I could throw one of their datacentres. Their processes are convoluted, opaque and seemingly designed specifically to frustrate and defeat anyone who has the misfortune to come into contact with them. As for human contact, forget about it. A truly odious organization.

So enough of the compliments, let's look at what's involved here.

In order to become an approved developer, Google want:

• Government ID (such as a passport or driving licence).
• To me, this is a complete non starter. I flat out refuse to provide this to a company which is capable of the cavalier treatment of personal data which I described in this article. It is literally not safe to do so. In any case, I believe that there are very few valid reasons for producing government ID documents to a private company, and this is definitely NOT one of them.
• A registration fee.
• To cover the administration costs. Of a system that is completely unnecessary in the first place. Unlike Play Store registration, this is simply not legitimate. Pure rent-seeking.
• Agreement to a set of Terms & Conditions.
• No, I haven't read them and have no intention of doing so as I'd like to maintain the will to live. This is Google, so they'll be labyrinthine and impenetrable. And change every 27 minutes. Not to mention put the poor sap of a developer at a serious disadvantage. I for one do not and will never agree to their terms, and if you are a fellow developer neither should you.
• Private Signing Key.
• They want what? What possible legitimate reason is there for demanding access to this? This is a joke, right? The clue is in the name, and handing this over to Google has the potential to open up a security nightmare, a Pandora's box of pain. The other requirements are bad enough, but this truly extracts the urine. Just say NO.

And all this hassle, all this unnecessary exposure of private data, all this cost, is for what? So we, as developers, can continue to self publish our apps just as we have always done? This, of course, is purely for Google's benefit, as it allows them to tighten their already choking stranglehold on the Android app ecosystem. Anything that gets in the way of Google's interests (like adblockers) will be ruthlessly suppressed, and small indie devs sidelined and locked out by future updates to this stinking system.

What this means for me is that I will no longer be able to develop an Android app or game and share it directly via this site or via a third-party app store, at least not in a way that doesn't introduce massive levels of friction for my users. What it means for you is that the phone or tablet that you paid good money for has now lost a major part of its latent functionality. You will be at the mercy of Google's so-called judgement about what you can trust - see the first paragraph of this article for details on that sorry situation. Google, the worlds largest advertising company, whose Play Store is such an exemplar of safety...

Anyone remember "Don't be Evil" ?

Android used to be open, but Google now seem to believe that their grip on the ecosystem and strong regulatory capture is such that they can now freely and blatantly abandon this principle without much, if any, official pushback. Sadly, given our current crop of supine, rubber backboned regulators, they're probably correct.

If this bothers you...

There are a couple of articles whose content I have drawn on here and which go into the matter in more depth. the first is from F-Droid, the open source app store (an excellent resource whose very existence is put in jeopardy by this nonsense):

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Sideloading

and the other (also linked to in the above article)

• Keep Android Open

This one also lists contact details for various country and regional regulators as well as links to numerous other articles on the subject.

Finally

As a last resort, it looks like you will still be able to sideload using ADB, and I will produce an article for that process in due course should the industry regulators (whose low quality plastic teeth were made in China by the lowest bidder) suck on their thumbs as I expect and let Google get away with this blatant, monopolistic gatekeeping and rent-seeking. Considering this along with the other restrictive things that they are doing or have done (Manifest V3 anyone?), it is beyond high time that this evil, parasitic monolith was not merely broken up, but totally fragmented in such a way that the pieces can never be reassembled.