The reality in South East Asia doesn't support that. You're assuming that the potential victims are able to either use Android alternative or that they are willing and able to educate themselves about scams. The reality in these countries is that neither is the case in practice. Daily lives depend a lot on smartphones and they play a big role in cashless financial transactions. Networking effects play a big role here. Android devices are the only category that is both widely available and affordable.

Education is also not that effective. Spreading warnings about scams is hard and warnings don't reach many people for a whole laundry list of reasons.

The status quo is decidedly not fine. Society must act to protect those that can't protect themselves. The only remaining question is the how.

Google has an approach that would work, but at a high cost. Is there an alternative change that has the same effects on scammers, but with fewer issues for other scenarios?

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bigstrat2003 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do. We try to educate people about scams. We give them warnings that what they are doing can be dangerous if misused. If they choose to ignore those things and proceed anyway, the only further step society could take is to take away the person's freedom to choose. And that is an unacceptable solution.

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gmueckl 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Society takes away individual's freedom to choose all the time. You can't choose not to pay your taxes. You can't choose to board a passenger plane without passing a security check. You can't just get a loan without any guarantees to the bank etc.

Education isn't really working at this global scale. It doesn't reach people the way you seem to belive it does. Many, if not most people are generally disinterested in learning new things and this gets amplified when it involves technology.

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philistine 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The status quo may not be perfect but it is the best we can do.

Nope. We could, for example, ask developers to register with their legal identity to release apps.

	▲	bigstrat2003 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That would be worse than the status quo.
	▲	pas 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		the open source community should ask for their own install key and that's it Play store can be fast and verification based and the F/OSS stores can be slower, reputation and review based. ... But fundamentally the easiest thing is to ask people to pay to unlock the phone's security barriers, this makes it harder and costlier for scammers.