The future of this elegant and proven system was put in jeopardy last month, when Google unilaterally decreed that Android developers everywhere in the world are going to be required to register centrally with Google. In addition to demanding payment of a registration fee and agreement to their (non-negotiable and ever-changing) terms and conditions, Google will also require the uploading of personally identifying documents[^regid], including government ID, by the authors of the software, as well as enumerating all the unique “application identifiers” for every app that is to be distributed by the registered developer.
If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid’s myriad users5 will be left adrift, with no means to install — or even update their existing installed — applications.
Fair point, but there’s quite a large hurdle to rooting a phone nowadays, and I’m not optimistic that FOSS will continue to work as well on Android for the average person once Google introduces these restrictions. iPhones could be jailbroken but there never really was much open source software on those things.
Unlike iPhones, where Apple dictates all iPhone to require literally hacking the phone via exploits to jailbreak, the ease of rooting a phone depends entirely on its OEM. Indeed there is Samsung the Apple wannabe who makes it physically impossible to root with locked bootloader, but there’s also Sony Xperia phones where Sony makes it clear about their specific open device policy with step-by-step instructions on their dedicated developer support webpage for how to unlock bootloader and the process itself taking less than 10 seconds.
Vote with your wallet, remind others to vote with their wallet, support OEMs who don’t do the kind of anti-rooting and anti-bootloader-unlocking practices, and support FOSS projects. This is our best chance, and Google is NOT going to stop themselves doing all the evil.
Also Mr. Average McPerson is not a real human being, and we shouldn’t be too concerned about the opinion of someone who doesn’t physically exist and is merely an abstract conceptual construct.