this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
758 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
74551 readers
4201 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is silly. Google doesn't give a single fuck. This decision will make money for key players and that's the end of the conversation.
It's very likely that no amount of negative feedback will change anything. Why not waste some of their time anyway? Write to them, call them, spread the word. This is the only thing we can do. Even if it goes through regardless - at the very least we can make it as unpleasant as possible.
Their AI will be looking over all of the responses, not people. No important person at Google’s time will be wasted on this.
That's why keywords are important. For instance I added the fact that if they continue in this course I will seek to de-Google my phones.
Like I said in another comment, unless they get tens of millions of actual unique-not-spam responses they will not even consider reconsidering. People aren’t going to de-google in any great numbers from this, because most of the people this will affect are already de-googled.
Rather than degoogling telling them you will go to Apple and opt for apple services is likely the more powerful response, since that is what the regular person is more likely to do. If degoogled is used they'll likely dismiss it assuming it is just one of those niche nerds. But an exodus to Apple is a threat that is more realistic.
But that makes no sense - they’ll go to someone who is even more restrictive in side loading?
Google won’t reverse this because there’s no alternative for the relatively few people this will affect. They already don’t use Google things, and Apple don’t accomodate them. They’ve got them by the balls and they know it, which is why it’s all just empty threats even from people in here.
The ones that don't sideload obviously won't care. But the ones that do are going to have little incentive to stick around if that was the main selling point for them, and the devs for non Google play apps leave because they don't want to hand over info to Google.
At that point why not go to Apple if Android no longer delivers the type of sideloading experience they desire? Apple is more polished, has longer support, battery life, and better peripherals.
And those types likely will push family to move to Apple too if they are jumping ship, since they might be the ones overseeing tech support for the family anyways.
No humans are involved in reviewing these. They go into the memory hole and that's that.
Assigned to: Some Indiandude (xWF)
I dunno, I'm sure there's a part of them that doesn't want to scare off all the free labor they get from the community developers. They are probably legitimately trying to gauge how much of an impact on that this will have. That doesn't mean they are going to stop or change anything, but they probably genuinely care enough to know.
This is the exact same argument the Hackintosh community had. "Apple will never put a stop to us, we're the hardcore tinkerers who find bugs in their software before any normal user!"
Google doesn't care. The hardcore users on the bleeding edge make up 0.001% of people with an Android phone. Pissing them off will not affect the shareholders.
Google’s thinking has gone short term “next quarter must go up.” They would absolutely trash their Android dev community for a quick buck, 100%.
Doesnt matter.
Give feedback and pray it somehow does something!
You do it for posterity reasons