Google can go fuck itself.

Hopefully this will put some jet fuel into the Linux phone development.

I’m checking out Graphene OS next week and pretty pumped about it. This Google ratfucking has been just the push I need to get off Android.

And obviously I haven’t stopped telling people around me haha

I don’t see why it would be.

The constraint to require a valid signing isn’t something imposed by the license on the Android code. If you want to distribute a version of Android that doesn’t check for a registered signature, that should work fine.

I mean, the Graphene guys could impose that constraint. But they don’t have to do so.

I think that there’s a larger issue of practicality, though. Stuff like F-Droid works in part because you don’t need to install an alternative firmware on your phone — it’s not hard to install an alternate app store with the stock firmware. If suddenly using a package from a developer that isn’t registered with Google requires installing an alternate firmware, that’s going to severely limit the potential userbase for that package.

But if Graphene chooses not to do this, they diverge from the Android project. Which will take more time to maintain the project which will ultimately lead to more developers burning out and dropping out of the project.

It doesn’t need to be affected, but most open source projects don’t have the resources to keep going against big companies when most of their users aren’t contributing.