Aside from the horrendous privacy implications, is there a possible argument that this is anti-competitive?

jeroenhd 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

the only anticompetitive element I can think of is the way they pushed their scanning app to Android phones with Play Services. On IOS they're not in control but still able to launch an app (app snippets the feature is called, I think?) but on Android they themselves killed off Instant Apps because nobody used it. If one of Google's competitors like hCAPTCHA tries to do the same, they'll have more friction on Android than Google does.

When it comes to GrapheneOS, it's the website owners that decided to block those devices by using this service. There are other services that don't block those phones they can use instead.

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realusername 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the whole goal of the concept. Safetynet (the predecessor of Play Integrity) was developed to block CyanogenMod and then later used to block Huawei.

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jeroenhd an hour ago | parent [-]

App developers need to put effort into enabling these APIs so it's not like Google is actively blocking your favorite apps. Their makers are.

Like with reCAPTCHA, there are other services and libraries out there to detect root access and other things companies want to detect in their apps.

	▲	realusername an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, Google was betting that bureaucratic companies would enroll voluntarily and it worked. > Like with reCAPTCHA, there are other services and libraries out there to detect root access and other things companies want to detect in their apps. My opinion on this is that any method to check integrity, root access or if developer mode is enabled is a security vulnerability by itself, no such app should be able to know that.