Many alternative AOSP-based systems work fine today and do not have the new Android Developer Verifier (wow, already rolled out to 500M+ devices [1], though still dormant).
To be honest, it is quite scary that Google is able to remotely roll out an app like that to all GMS Android phones. Of course, we all knew that, but it highlights again that Google can remotely take away functionality that you had before, brick your phone, etc.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
We used to call programs like this, that allow someone to remotely break your system, a Trojan horse...
and now people install Remote Access Trojans just to let GPT and Claude think and work for them, granting them shell and a11y access. really? after seeing that, nothing surprises me
Yes, really. The obvious answer that security maximallists deny even exists is, who is doing it and why. In LLM case, users are doing it themselves to allow a way of computing they want and find useful, in spite of platform locks designed to deny users just that.
I mean, go tell Anthropic to prompt Claude to make it adopt Landlock in Claude Code instead of regex-based filtering. actually adopt it, not how Codex did, but with controls on the level of some third-party harnesses and Pi plugins.
> brick your phone, etc.
Apple can do the same for iPhones. In terms of dark shit they can do there's no difference anymore.
> To be honest, it is quite scary that Google is able to remotely roll out an app like that to all GMS Android phones.
Are any commercial mobile phone vendors not able to do such a thing? Do remember that this giant kerfuffle is all over the seeming preparation for the apparent removal of a developer feature that iPhones have never had at all.
Wait till you hear that your OEM can remotely rollout full OS updates with full access to all your data and drivers... carrying Google software and most of it Google code.
Snarks do not lead to productive discussions. You also know that there is has always been an implicit social contract between users and vendors. The vendor rolls out updates as part of the service attached to the device (typically included in the purchase price) and that the vendor does not abuse the update mechanism to make things worse for the user.
If vendors use updates to restrict functionality that the user had before, puts existing features behind paywalls, etc. people are rightfully outraged, because it breaks the social contract.
It's just that the repeated offenses have made us insensitive. Imagine Debian rolling out some mechanism that only allows you to install software outside their repos with a 24 hour delay. It would destroy Debian.
>implicit social contract
Sounds worthless (in court).
And that's how you get a low-trust society.