Evilham 

I had been maintaining a more privacy-friendly fork of an Android app, and released it on Google's Play Store.

It used to be mostly fine to deal with their paperwork and bureaucracy, nowadays it's ridiculous.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/13392821

They want app maintainers to upload a frigging video of each feature; this is SO MUCH added work for basically no gain. I could show just one place where these services are used in an OK fashion and not others where they could be shady.

Anyway, giving up on Google's crap and setting up a private #fdroid repository; that's significantly easier.

Dec 31 at 12:57pmWeb
Show threadEvilham Dec 31

Note that running your own #fdroid repository is still going to be an option, but only for a couple year; that is until 2027 (welp, is that just one year?).

Google plans to force all apps to be registered, effectively becoming gatekeepers of what can and cannot be installed in physical devices you buy.

This is their plan, it's public.
https://developer.android.com/developer-verification

"Open and Safe" has extremely narrow and biased definitions of those words that have nothing to do with my understanding of Open and Safe.

Show threadʙʙʀᴀᴅʟᴇyDec 31
@evilham That is an insane level of expected effort, especially when most big app publishers post an utterly useless change log along the lines of...
"New version🎉 Bug fixes and performance improvements"
... or similar