Keep in mind that Android is super popular everywhere democracy isn't.

I'm just spitballing something which would be completely trivial for any 'techie' (and wouldn't require jumping through 24 hr hoops), while improving the situation for the other 99%. Or Android becomes iOS and some minority of techies use some weirdo linux phone, whatever.

If "they" is Google, this is just a really pointless middleman proposal. Android does all the cert stuff.

Also Chrome trusts like 300 CAs. Does that work? Probably not if you live in 200 of those countries.

Yeah, I predict that "developer mode" will eventually be a setup option in the trust store, so you'd have reset the phone to get to it.

With billions of Android users, there's only millions of people who need or really want this. So like 1%. My point is stop thinking about your mom's windows box and consider the scale.

Keep in mind that Android has like a billion users who have never touched a Windows computer. (And unmanaged Windows was/is also a disaster zone.) Coming at this from a internet forum perspective is missing the scope of the problem.

> I'm fine with an opt-in lock-down feature

Me too, but it's really just some UI semantics whether this is 'opt-in' or 'opt-out'. Essentially it would be an option to set up the phone in "developer mode".