[darkwater]

> In Google's announcement in Nov 2025, they articulated a pretty clear attack vector. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...

This reeks of "think of the children^Wscammed". I mean, following this principle the only solution is to completely remove any form of sideloading and have just one single Google approved store because security.

> A related approach might be mandatory developer registration for certain extremely sensitive permissions, like intercepting notifications/SMSes...? O

It doesn't work like that. What they mean with "mandatory developer registration" is what Google already does if you want to start as a developer in Play Store. Pay 25$ one-time fee with a credit card and upload your passport copy to some (3rd-party?) ID verification service. [1] In contrast with F-Droid where you just need a GitLab user to open a merge request in the fdroid-data repository and submit your app, which they scan for malware and compile from source in their build server.

[1] but I guess there are plenty of ways to fool Google anyway even with that, if you are a real scammer.