Did some research and here are your options:
- use custom mod (the new restriction only applies to certified devices). You can use microG (/e/, iode, Lineage) or sandboxing (GrapheneOS) to run apps requiring Google services. Google will still try to kill it but my bet is it will still work for at least a couple of years
- Ubuntu Touch - you can buy new devices with it, it can run android apps using waydroid but you will not be able to run any apps requiring google services. It can run native Linux apps. Native UT apps are build using QML. It has a completely new system API so it’s closer to Android then native Linux. It’s based on Halium which uses the kernel from Android
- PostmarketOS - native Linux running native Linux apps. Can use waydroid. Few supported devices but everything works on PinePhone Pro and few others phones.
- Droidian or similiar - Debian running on Halium. Kind of half way between PostmarketOS and Ubunut Touch. Native Linux but running on Android based kernel
Personally, I will stick with GrapheneOS for now (my Pixel still has at least 6 years of support). When I’m unable to run all the apps I need on it I will switch to two phones setup: stock Android for work/car apps, some Linux phone for everything else. When my Pixel dies I will switch to iPhone.
Wasn’t Apple sued for not allowing sideloading?
You will be able sideload but the developer has to be authorized by Google. I.e. you can still install apps from f-droid but people publishing apps on f-droid will have to register with Google.
Great. This could be just the boost that free android needs. Graphene and eos can brace for a few new customers i guess
Graphene developers seem enthusiastic to all the bullshit that Google comes up with, and on security/privacy tradeoff they seem to usually choose security. Case in point, the mandatory battery update.
CalyxOS seems to choose privacy first, but that project folded recently.
I didn’t fold. They are just reorganizing. Don’t spread misinformation.
I’m probably going to spam this around a bit, since most people don’t seem to know about it, but a reminder that FuriLabs has a (GNU+)Linux phone with decent spec.s and the ability to run Android app.s (from what I’ve heard) pretty decently: https://furilabs.com/
Biggest drawback is it’s based on Halium. Usual growing pains of a new product/company apply but apparently the company is pretty responsive and their dev.s have worked with customers to get things like calling working with the carrier and bands of their country where it hasn’t worked before so improvements move pretty quickly.
Collection of different experiences I’ve variously seen online over the last year or so:
- https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2025/07-20-flx1-actually-usable-linux-phone.gmi
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41839326
- https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1fa1ljn/furilabs_flx1/
- https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1j46f2w/flx1_linux_phone_display_out/
- https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/03/furiphone_flx1/
I don’t own one, myself, so I can’t give any personal experience but I’ve seen it around for a few years now but most people don’t seem to even know about it. Maybe there’s a reason for that? But none I’ve ever seen anyone say.
HOLY SHIT IS THAT A HEADPHONE JACK?!
Seriously this ticks boxes Ive given up on. I never thought Id see a phone with all three: waterproof, removable battery, headphone jack. It even has wireless charging which isnt really one of my boxes but is a little extra if you use it.
Oof, time to bite the bullet and switch email providers. Shit like this is why I’ve spent the last couple years de-googling my life.
Do it! It’s not that bad. Everyone’s got different needs, but I switched to fastmail and have been enjoying it.
If you’re making the switch anyway, get yourself a domain name from a separate company to run it through. That way in the future you can keep using your domain even if you switch mail/web-hosting providers.
I have a domain and an email address through it, but my problem is I can’t find a domain name I like enough to both keep and give out to others as a long term contact point. The one I have right now is silly, and not easy to communicate over the phone.
It’s a me problem, but if I ever figure out something I’m will to keep and is available, that’s the goal.
Have two:
The silly one for personal or non-professional stuff like Steam
The professional one for the ones you are meeting irl.
Google getting rid of all the things that made people want an android phone over an iPhone.
Linux phones are moving fast but it feels like Android is moving faster on the other direction 😥
(Yes I know Android is built over Linux, I mean more traditional and open distros like postmarketos)
Whatever things made people get into Android some 20 years ago are no longer relevant to the majority of people.
The biggest benefit will remain the apps. People love apps. In that regard, their only competition is Apple. It’s why no one can make a new phone OS.
The other reason is cost. If you want a cheap device, Apple has no such thing. There are hundreds of Android devices you can buy for a couple hundred dollars.
For those who buy Samsung flagships for more than an iPhone, well those people I can’t explain.
Yep, if this happens there is no benefit to android.
I mean, there is still UI/UX, app store policies, and general cost/options.
This definitely makes Android a lot less appealing. But it is also questionable to act like the biggest reason to use android was sideloading apps since the vast majority of users don’t even know that is an option (and probably shouldn’t since they have no understanding of how to vet them). Especially since Apple isn’t any better (?).
Comrade, the ignorance of the masses should not dilute our anger
So… “the ignorance of the masses” should be combatted by willful ignorance and nonsense that falls apart the moment anyone looks at it?
Get angry. I sure am. Look for alternatives. Graphene sure ain’t it but I hope it will be in the next four or five years. But this is something google are willing to futz with for a reason: The vast majority of users don’t care about it and even with the changes it isn’t significantly worse than the competition.
Yet everywhere I see “Well, I guess I have to buy Apple now” which is just… buy it if you want to but don’t pretend this shit is why.
It’s still a step up from iOS, which has had similar restrictions since they started.
Apple allows sideloading (somewhat), this is would be demonstrably worse (if enacted)
somewhat
Yes. Only in the EU and only since 2024 when Apple was forced to do it by new laws. It’s reasonable to assume Google would be subject to the same laws.
If you live outside if the EU, it’s “no sideload for you!” There are computer programs that can do sideloading to iPhones, but they have limitations, like having to refresh the sideloaded apps every seven days.
Unfortunately, that is 0.1% of their global market that is affected. So, they don’t really have much to lose.
Modern business strategy be like “If you’re not building an illegal monopoly, consider doing so for more money”
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
Malware-ridden apps made it into Google’s Play Store, scored 19 million downloads
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/26/apps_android_malware/
Right, only install “verified” from Google Play, but that is where malware is, other 3rd party app stores like F-Droid, that really verify apps are at risk of getting killed by Google
This is very obviously step one in a plan to kill apps like alternative YouTube clients that block ads, just like the Manifest V3 rollout was intended to kill ad blockers in Chrome. Once they have everyone using this verification system, then they can just arbitrarily deverify anything that contravenes whatever new acceptable usage policy they just made up.
The opensource apps like Newpipe, SmartTube, termux and many others are the “malware”, not the ones with binary blobs on PlayStore that fork VLC, Newpipe and many opensource apps illegally, supposedly “verified” but don’t follow opensource license like GPL, creating fake clones with ads and (real) malware.
Google can’t keep malware off the platform now, but sure, make it mandatory you can’t go anywhere else unless they say so first.
Remember that brief period in the US where, for a fleeting moment, Lina Khan went after a few companies for monopolistic practices?
Brother let me tell you about my friend Janet Reno, who fucked with Microsoft in 2001…
Yeah man, those were the days.
How about letting the users decide what to sideload? What the hell?
I hope the EU is ready to also sue Google.
The EU already forced sideloading to be officially supported on iPhones thanks to the Digital Markets Act, and that law applies to Google as well.
The US will likely apply pressure, just like they are trying to force their death machines to be legalized on European roads. Apple already tried to pressure the union and failed, but the political climate has changed a bit since then, and while EU bureaucrats can be fierce, European leadership tends to be weak as fuck.
But yeah, chances are that this change won’t apply to the EU. :)
It’s too bad they were too terrible at writing legislation to be successful.
What exactly do you mean?
Sure, nothing is perfect, but EU legislation has generally been quite good, from the GDPR to the DMA.
The challenges are more related to enforcement - rules on the book are worth nothing if we don’t force companies to live by them. In this respect we’ve seen some pretty sloppy behaviour, but also some victories. It’s not a one-sided story.
Another challenge is of course to keep passing good laws, and to avoid terrible ones. Chat control needs to be stopped. Stopping it is a matter of convincing national governments it’s a bad idea, as well as members of the European Parliament - everyone should be writing their representatives NOW. But that’s another issue entirely. :)
don’t iphones delete your sideloaded apps against your will and along with your data, if you don’t use the ibstaller tool at once every week?
if so that’s useless for anybody other than developers themselves who otherwise don’t even want to use their own app.
I have no idea as I don’t follow apple much, but I am aware that they are constantly trying to find ways to avoid complying with EU law, and that it is often rapidly struck down.
What you’re describing here is not a failure of the law, but Apple trying real hard to find creative ways not to comply with it. To me it only shows that they are desperate, and that EU law is in fact getting to them.
If they keep at it it’ll eventually end up in court, the case will take a couple of years, and they’ll be slammed with a fine and asked to get their shit together.
Does the law demand unsigned software?
Google is clearly trying to find a loophole here. Their loophole clearly sucks.
In all likelihood it’ll end up in front of the Court of Justice of the European Union. And in all likelihood Google will lose again.
The Court of Justice generally seems unimpressed by American lobbyists, so the strategy of finding a dumb loophole is probably doomed to fail.
That didn’t answer my question. M
Does the law demand unsigned software?
The answer is no. It’s not phrased like that. But it’s all about ensuring free competition in digital markets. The sole purpose of Google’s move here is to hinder competition in their own digital market, and to keep control over it.
So the law does not have a paragraph stating that “unsigned software must be allowed”, but it has a bunch of other paragraphs that can be used to strike down on monopolistic behaviour.
Google are aware of the law, and will try to find a loophole by designing a system that they believe technically complies with it. Then someone will sue them, it will end up in the European court, and the European court will in all likelyhood tell Google to get fucked.
It seems american tech companies think they can get away with anything because that’s how it works in the US. We are repeatedly seeing that this is not how it works in Europe: the Court of Justice tends to care deeply about the intention of the law, as well as the perceived consequences of their rulings. And they don’t seem to care all that much about American capitalists.
But to answer your question very simply: No, it doesn’t. But thankfully that doesn’t matter at all.
European leadership tends to be weak as fuck.
which is utterly disheartening.
The EU is currently deepthroating Trump so hard that it’s completely out of breath and all our clothes are ruined.
With how volatile Trump is this could change literally anyday, but with the current political equilibrium all google would have to do is gift trump a shiny golden thing so he makes a threatening remark about gas exports and the EU would go “uwu yes master right away master, do you want to fuck my gaping asshole while you’re at it?”.
It will probably be for the rest of the world.
EU devices not effected.
The moment I don’t get to run my own stuff and F-Droid, I’ll be switching off smartphones.
Dumbphone with tethering
A mini laptop/cyberdeck
A modern mp3 player
A small, modern point and click camera
hey gramps, where’d you get that gear, 2007?
I’ll use the ugliest command line only smartphone over fully walled garden android
Real talk, are there ones like that?
Ive seen things like https://www.tindie.com/products/zitaotech/hackberrypi5-with-9900-keyboard/ and I REALLY want one…but they are always sold out.
That looks simple enough to build yourself.
I don’t know, sorry
I’ll probably go with one of the other roms on an older phone or possibly one of the Linux phones. It won’t be exactly what I want, but it’ll be better than their walled garden bullshit. That’s precisely why I left Apple way back when.
Or we just… ignore them?
LineageOS and GrapheneOS could just be like “well, go on, then.”
There’s a market for everything and the FOSS and maker markets would eat up an open Android phone, even if the only apps you could install were community-created.
I don’t like how tech is evolving…
There’s already a firm divide between the foss/self sufficiency crowd and modern tech.
If this is bad enough, you’d see every foss faithful walking around with a laptop, mp3 player and camera like they’re in 2009.
Every day that passes I use my T480 more and more, it will die with me
Devolving*
It’s evolving, just towards authoritarianism.
It was always intended to be this way.
The beginning was pre-enshittification. We’re going from the good ole’ days to the future, and the future sure as shit aint for you unless you’re in the club… and you aint, none of us are.
We need to make our own club, with blackjack and hookers!
Democracy is dead. Welcome to the neo dark ages. Take up arms.
Well, I mean, we have yet to see an actual serious cyberattack right? Aren’t security needs going to increase, not decrease?
The ability to filter information using proprietary devices and software in the kernel of all of these garbage devices is the core issue. Trusting the owners of that code is to surrender your right to unbiased and unfiltered information. I am not at all concerned about hacking or security by small insignificant players. I am massively concerned about the extremely powerful using the leverage they have normalized and embedded to become tyrannical neo feudal lords in a fascist society. Google IS the biggest danger by orders upon orders of magnitude. Trusting them is to give up democracy entirely.
All mobile devices are proprietary. Android is a scheme to make a Linux kernel that has everything ready to deploy except the actual hardware drivers for the processor and modem. Manufacturers take this kernel and add their proprietary binaries at the last possible moment. That source code is not available anywhere. The hardware documentation is not available anywhere publicly. Every device model is just different enough that reverse engineering one does nothing transferable to any other. The level of reverse engineering is extreme and requires destroying many devices using things like fuming nitric acid and fluorine solutions just to have a small chance at reading some parts of embedded memory. These are some of the most dangerous and hazardous chemicals humans make, and you still need xray equipment, special microscopes with stepping automation to stitch images, and a ton of time.
This is moving to a tyrannical surveillance state of fascist authoritarianism. Open source software is a major front on the line of real democracy. This is a nuclear bomb released on that democracy. You fear the wrong pirates and criminals. The biggest threats always come from within. Trust as a mechanism is fundamentally antithetical to democracy. Everyone demanding trust is a traitor to democracy. Trust is the key of the fascist kingdom. Once that key is held, democracy has failed regardless of whomever is aware of the situation. Democracy requires fully informed citizens with skepticism and the liberal right to decide for themselves even when they are wrong. This is impossible without full access to information. The source of that information cannot be filtered at any level. We already have the narrowest bottleneck of available information sources in the last 1000 years of history. There are only 2 relevant web crawlers. All search queries filter through one or both of these two and the results from these are not deterministic. Two people searching for the same thing at the same time will get very different and very biased results. This is individualized regardless of any protections people imagine they have in place. Outside of the internet there is no real unbiased media. A dozen people own it all. Even the garbage claiming to comb all sources is drawing the line and dictating what is center right or left is. Anyone at the grassroots level is impossible to find because there are no organic unbiased search results. The results are all filtered junk full of agenda and bias.
This is the real big picture abstract issue in play. When the maga traitors said this was a coup, they absolutely ment that. Mobile devices are all rental garbage someone else controls. Your computer likewise has a secret operating system running in the background that you do not control. In Intel it is called the Intel Management Engines or ME. This started with Intel VPro in 2008. AMD adopted it is 2013. Arm has one too.
All that is left is to steal your right to have a digital front door by eliminating DNS filtering and all of these devices will be controlled and connected directly by someone else that is watching and listening at all times. You are already in tethers as a digital slave that can be bought and sold for exploitation and manipulation without your consent or knowledge using your digital presence. You have not effectively realized the implications of that surrendering of rights to citizenship with full autonomy. The next step is to redefine the word citizen to be functionally equivalent to slave. “You will own nothing, and you will be happy about it” because if you are not, you will be dead. This is the death of democracy. My words will echo in your head years from now. The dystopia to come is beyond anything you can presently imagine and there is no way to stop it now short of taking up arms and playing Luigi if you are able.
The consolidation of wealth is what really made Caesar. That was the death of the republic. It was not Caesar. We are all a product of our time and environment. It was the consolidation of great wealth. All that wealth did not give a shit about Rome, it went to Constantinople for better opportunities at first chance because consolidation of wealth is treasonous. It is as it was, just look at outsourcing and off shoring, or the disgusting mismanagement of banking and housing that have made the American worker completely uncompetitive with Asian counterparts at the same standard of living. No, I have no fear of the boogie man or foreign state actors. I am terrified of the criminal that normalizes domestic trust, actively manipulates and exploits me, and steals my purchased property. That is a real monster.
Increasingly, I think people like yourself should be working to develop systems that don’t just use all this shit. Or systems that use the old shit that doesn’t have all of this modern baggage you speak of.
I know it seems impossible. But it also seems like no one is trying.
honestly the hardware seems to be the harder part. for software we could just fork android and tear out the restrictive parts.
I hope MS doesn’t start doing this to Windows or else that would kill WINE/Proton, and also severely harm Windows itself given how deeply sideloading exes or msi files is ingrained into that OS.
Why would Linux have to respect the certificates? Run whatever random software you want!
maybe it could even turn out to be a sometimes useful measure there with the slight change of placing the decision in the hands of the user.
Didn’t the old arm version of windows have this limitation though? It only ran signed exes with a chain of trust?
I feel like this is probably where things might be heading overall “for our safety”. People saying it’s only the pixel. It’s only the pixel so far. And I think Samsung are locking up bootloaders too. I fully expect both to become the norm.
Oh you’ll be able to get a phone that isn’t locked this way. With 4 generations out of date hardware at twice the price of the current flagship because it’s a niche product they just can not make at scale to be affordable.
Also I’ve said it elsewhere, local/personal compute is something I fully expect to become a rare and expensive hobby too.
And custom-built PCs are already getting priced further and further out of the market for everyone who isn’t rich; mini PCs are slowly taking over the budget segments, and even some of the mid-range as well.
Next step if it’s allowed to get that far would be locking out alternate OSes after upgradeable PCs are all but eliminated except for HEDT.
so basically i have to send in my id to google just to sideload a test apk i made in flutter to my own phone to test it out?
Ad it’s just another data point for corporations and governments to be able to tie all your tech activities to your real identity. Great for surveillance!
and if it will work like the play store, you will need to upload an apk* and download the signed version, so it’s not even immediately obvious if they changed anything.
* not really an apk but an intermediate build product
Just like apple. 😔
