alt Hacker NewsI'm wondering if the EU is complicit in this somehow, despite claiming that they want to fight back against tech companies.
The EU Commission is currently pushing the shitty EU Identity Wallet for mandatory age verification, and it requires GooglePlay Services to be installed for "anti-tampering". That also means a ban on non official versions of Android like LineageOS and GrapheneOS.
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The "anti-tampering" excuse lands flat when sideloaded apps on stock Android can still touch the same sensitive data through Play Integrity, and the only people it shuts out are the ones technical enough to care about their own OS. That is vendor lock-in. For a bloc that spends half its time scolding Big Tech, the Comission looks weirdly happy to route age checks and state ID through Google Play Services.
The DMA team replied to me that they did not see any legal issues with Google enforcing mandatory ID for sideloading apps.
We need an urgent upgrade of the DMA v2.O, in the fast paced Omnibus package.
Feel free to post proposals here.