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Comment by patcon | Hacker News Reader

This creeping authoritarianism is why Google's play to force developer registration (before allowing a developers apps to be installed on android) is so irresponsible of Google: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028

It's like they don't understand what's possible to be coerced into from there. They cite "danger to users" as the rationale, but their imagination of danger is so damn limited

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> their imagination of danger is so damn limited

I wouldn't pretend to understand the Android app ecosystem better than Google.

A charitable guess would be that Google understands that forcing developer registration will introduce more risk for some people, but overall the total risk over the entire population is reduced. It's a net benefit.

> This creeping authoritarianism

Surely you must see the other side of this in that there is massive fraud taking place via Android phones?

There is even more massive fraud taking place within Google's ecosystem of approved apps on Android. Google does nothing at all about it for the simple reason that Google cashes in on a percentage of the loot. I myself have been scammed by two apps that claimed to offer specific services, but they didn't offer them.

Most privately installed apps are for open source degoogled software that doesn't want to bother with Google.

You're not considering that they were already coerced into forced dev registration.

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