I can easily believe that Google's YouTube team would love to kill off such apps, if they can make a significant (say ≥1%) impact on revenue. (After all, being able to make money from views is an actual part of the YouTube product features that they promise to “creators”, which would be undermined if they made it too easy to circumvent.)

But having seen how things work at large companies including Google, I find it less likely for Google's Android team to be allocating resources or making major policy decisions by considering the YouTube team. :-) (Of course if Android happened to make a change that negatively affected YouTube revenue, things may get escalated and the change may get rolled back as in the infamous Chrome-vs-Ads case, but those situations are very rare.) Taking their explanation at face value (their anti-malware team couldn't keep up: bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly. It becomes an endless game of whack-a-mole. Verification changes the math by forcing them to use a real identity) seems justified in this case.

My point though was that whatever the ultimate stable equilibrium becomes, it will be one in which the set of apps that the average person can easily install is limited in some way — I think Google's proposed solution here (hobbyists can make apps having not many users, and “experienced users” can opt out of the security measures) is actually a “least bad” compromise, but still not a happy outcome for those who would like a world where anyone can write apps that anyone can install.

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Zak 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I would like a world where buying something means you get final say over how it operates even if you might do something dangerous/harmful/illegal.

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miki123211 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I would like a world where I have the final say over whether I should have a final say.

One way to achieve this is to only allow sideloading in "developer mode", which could only be activated from the setup / onboarding screen. That way, power users who know they'll want to sideload could still sideload. The rest could enjoy the benefits of an ecosystem where somebody more competent than their 80-year-old nontechnical self can worry about cybersecurity.

Another way to do this would be to enforce a 48-hour cooldown on enabling sideloading, perhaps waived if enabled within 48 hrs of device setup. This would be enough time for most people to literally "cool off" and realize they're being scammed, while not much of an obstacle for power users.

	▲	jraph a minute ago \| parent \| next [-]
		These two solutions wouldn't work for me. My phone is covered, I use a custom ROM, but I like being able to help people install cool stuff that's not necessarily on the Play store, organically, without planning.
	▲	vrighter 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You can sideload, I mean INSTALL, software on any linux desktop. Yet there are still tons of people saying that desktop linux has gotten good enough for most of everyone's grandma to daily-drive.
	▲	HumanOstrich 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm not sure I like the idea of "you have to wait 48 hours now for sideloading in case you are an idiot". Most idiots will then have sideloading on after 48 hours and still get hit with the next scam anyway.

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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