A lot of people here are looking for compromises. Any compromise on this means giving ground to Google's monopoly and the war on open computing and ultimately freedom.

This is exactly what Google intended. This is why they started off by announcing completely removing device owner chosen installs (this is not side loading! It's simply installing.) and announced only apps allowed by Google would be available for install.

They knew it would cause backlash. They anticipated that and planned ahead faking a compromise.

They are trying to boil us like frogs by so slowly raising the temperature so we do not notice. Whenever the water gets so warm that people do notice they cool it down a little. But they will turn up the the heat again!

This 24h window is designed to make device owner controlled installs as unattractive as possible. They try to reduce it as much as they can while having plausible deniability ("You can still install apps not whitelisted by us"). They want to get the concept of people installing software of their own choice onto their own device as far away from the mainstream as possible. They want to marginalize it. They want to slowly and quietly kill off the open Android app ecosystem by reducing the user base.

The next step will be them claiming that barely anyone is installing apps not signed by them anyway. First they make people jump through ridiculous hoops to install non whitelisted apps, then they use the fact that few people jump through these hoops to justify removing the ability altogether.

Google does not care about preventing scams. If they did they would do something against the massive amount of scam ads that they host. Scams are just their "think of the children".

Do not play by their playbook!

Do not give them ground!

We must not accept any restrictions on the software we run on our own devices. The concept of ownership, personal autonomy and choice are being dismantled. Our freedom is the target of a slow, long waging war. This is yet another attack.

We must not compromise with the attacker. We must not give them any centimeter of ground.

Fortunately older versions of Android, especially rooted ones, won't be affected.

It's 2026 and regulators are finally getting around to do something about the mobile app distribution chokehold.

And Google thinks they can pull this? I hope regulators make it very clear that this is the wrong direction, and with record fines.

im just as much of a hater of this as the next guy, because i depend on custom apks for work sometimes. pushing custom apks over adb is apparently going to be fine, so if that holds true, i dont care about this. at the end of the day, buying an android phone is buying a google device. i dont get the righteousness here. wouldnt this energy be better spent on discussing how we could make a new open source os to rival that of google? why would anyone at google (company at the forefront of anti privacy measures) care about what some nerds on the internet think about privacy? its like an ant screaming in front of an approaching bulldozer.