Well, the issue will be developers of other apps would force us to re-google since any build of the app would be useless unless installed from the play store...
Are they? Other comments in different PRs seem to indicate they have no intention of trying to subvert play integrity. Is there something more recent than this that indicates they're trying?
For every single app where the developer tries this?
Yeah right. That's unsustainable.
They'll also just increase ways for the integrity to verify it hasn't been patched. This announcement already says they're checking the app's binary for tampering.
Explain. I'm tired of hearing this boogeyman, tell me exactly how Lineage is "not secure" but Graphene is?
Then maybe give me some examples of cases where that difference has actually been a problem.
Because it feels like a lot of these "unsecure" things people hand-wring over are really just user freedoms they may use to hurt themselves, not actual vulnerabilities that can't be avoided with common sense.
I mean, you can be as snotty about this as you like, but it doesn't change the fact this "choice" is basically between participate in the same digital world as most people do with the most popular, most supported, and highest value apps, vs only what you can use in F Droid or something?
You're calling them slaves but can you give them anything more appealing outside the walled garden than "privacy"? It's not like everything on the play store has an F-Droid corollary. You're basically telling them to dramatically reduce their own use case. Does that make them a slave?
If a phone can't be flashed to a different OS, then it can be degoogled with adb via pc, or Shizuku + Canta directly on the phone. There are other apps besides Canta that also work, but Canta is the easiest for non-techies to use.
Never buy an Apple product if you value sovereignty. Androids can be tweaked to cut out big brother.
Google is overreaching, yet again. That's the gist of it. They want to be a monopoly. Better to get out now, than to wait until they're so engrained in our lives that they become a shadow government. Our best short-term fix is to break up the company like we did to AT&T. Our best long-term fix is to erraticate money and corporate influence from politics entirely.
There are more options, you just have to look. GrapheneOS, LineageOS, CalyxOS, DivestOS, /e/OS... Android is not synonymous with Google. Android is open source. All the OSs I've listed are based off of Android, and are open source. Google has their own version of Android, which is closed source. But it's just another OS based off of AOSP.