F-Droid is a nerd solution and will be used by 0.00001% of the total market. There are more people that will use Linux on desktop than will use F-Droid.

We need governments to mandate both Apple and Google to allow web installs of apps. No requirement for Apple/Google pay, Apple/Google login, or Apple/Google services.

Total freedom for users, for developers, and for competitors.

This duopoly has fucked over America and the EU by training us to think only these two companies have the right to decide what gets to be on your phone that you pay for.

They've created a moat so strong that it's impossible to compete with Android/iPhone, so the market cannot even have healthy competition.

F-Droid is not the answer. Regulation is.

And I'll have none of this fangirl/fanboy "but my grandma will fall for scams" nonsense.

Google and Amazon and all the platforms have scammy ads on their platforms. Nobody's doing anything about that.

Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted. It's easy to make this safe in the year of our lord 2026. Don't pretend we don't have a million ways to make this safe for your meemaw. She's more likely to fall down the stairs or get a scam call.

Regulate Google. Regulate Apple. Make our phones free.

On Youtube just now I got hit with an ad whose first 5 unskippable seconds were an AI person saying "Did you know the cure for dimentia is in the Bible!?!?" - considering who that ad is targetting, Google can F off with any stance about protecting people from scams.

> Technology can be sandboxed, permissioned, signed, fingerprinted, attested, scanned, and blacklisted.

Many of the things you're listing are the exact things the platforms would have to be banned from doing by the regulation you're proposing because they're the mechanisms used to exclude competitors.

If you put all apps in a sandbox then they can't perform certain operations (e.g. install other apps) which inherently means they can't compete in the market for doing those things. If apps have to be signed by the platform then the signing fee becomes the vig they charge to everyone even if they're using a competing store, and both that and scanning/fingerprinting provide a mechanism to revoke competing apps under arbitrary pretexts and otherwise grief their developers and users.

Attestation is the thing you would have to ban the most because it's not just subject to abuse, its very mechanism of operation is to prevent existing apps that use it from running on a competing new system at the point in time when the new system has too few users for all the apps to explicitly add support for it, thereby preventing the competitor from getting enough users for that to ever happen.

But attestation doesn't prevent grandma from getting scammed anyway. When the scammer calls pretending to be the grandchild who needs money for an emergency, they use the official signed bank app on the attestation-passing device to transfer money to the scammer. When the scammer is using a fake bank app to steal the user's credentials, the fake app doesn't require attestation.

The actual problem here is that you want to have someone vetting apps for grandma, but you don't want the platforms to be able to insist it be them rather than F-Droid or Aurora etc. Which the platforms will try to claim is chicken and egg (how do you know you can trust F-Droid?) while hoping you don't notice that they don't actually get you out of it -- how do you know you can trust Google?

Android is Google's billboard/surveillance tool they've invested deeply in.

Why on earth would they let anyone else participate?

The government is not going to regulate them, any more than they are going to fix the countless other cartels that operate with impunity.

Google already allows web installs on Android, no regulation required. But yes, iOS allowing that would be excellent.