Locked app store was my primary reason staying away from iPhone.
Now, this is gone. It also open door for censorship, like disabling ICE-tracking or
other politically inconvenient apps. This is a terrible decision for Android and for our freedoms.
Do we really want a future where 99.9% of people's pocket computers must ask for permission from one of two companies to run something on a device?
If they want to have a closed platform, do what Microsoft did with Xbox and create something new.
If you don't like that, you have to do what they did in the EU and change the law.
Fraud is illegal here today, and Google's marketing was definitely fraudulent, so there is clearly something that can be done about it today.
Sorry man. The EU Cyber Resilience Act is forcing these changes. An operating system is a class 1 important product. A tamper-resistant microchip is a class 2 important product. A device with a secure element is a critical product. Your smartphone has all of these pieces. Manufactures must follow a list of best practices to enjoy a presumption of conformity. That list of best practices is being compiled and made ready for publication, with full effect in 2026/2027. Google knows what is coming. Everyone big knows what’s coming.
True open source with no monetization can get a pass. Everyone else has to do this.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=OJ:L...
Even RMS needs money once in a while, short of eating bits of his own flesh.. oh wait!
People buying phones by and large do not care in the slightest about "openness". Whether or not their phone supports sideloading is completely and utterly irrelevant to them.
But aside from that, it would be enermously difficult to prove that Google made claims that were unequivocally false while advertising Android. Sure, they made some vague claims about Android being an "open" platform. But they had more than enough well-compensated lawyers on their side to avoid making specific promises about specific functionality that could eventually land them in court.
Finally, even if some of the claims Google made about Android in 2015 no longer hold up in 2025, that in and of itself is not illegal. Google is allowed to change and adapt Android over time as it sees fit. Though you and I may disagree with their findings, they have internally identified systemic security threats caused by unrestricted sideloading, and have created a solution to this real-world problem (however flawed it may be). There is no reason under the current laws of the United States that they should not be allowed to make those changes (aside from perhaps general antitrust law, but that is not enough in this instance as evidenced by the outcome of Epic Games' case against Google). Perhaps they will have to change their advertising going into the future, and they can definitely no longer reuse older advertising materials promoting Android's capability for unrestricted sideloading (if those exist). But just because they advertised Android as having feature X in the past does not mean that they would break the law if they were to remove feature X in the future after they stopped running those old ads.
(Yes, it gets a little blurry in the case of software because it often automatically updates and offers no option to downgrade. But phones don't last forever. In the worst case Google could just wait ~5 years from today to implement Developer Verification.)
OEMs may be forced to do the same, but 3rd party ROMs will not.
I do agree this cuts deeply for F-Droid.
Originally, device makers who used Android themselves were contractually prohibited from manufacturing devices for any company that forked Android, for instance.
Google are also making that harder, at least for the Pixel line by no longer publishing the device tree as part of AOSP.
I know Fairphone do publish a buildable tree - though it's not yet available for their latest device - does anyone else?
Not sure why you're calling this non-unlockable. Everything is unlockable with enough money.
Maybe we use some hardware-level trick to get to some protected firmware initially to reverse engineer it, but almost universally it's what reads the state of the fuses (or something after it) that actually gets exploited. That's changing, too, but in general very slowly and at at the pace of hardware manufacturers learning how to make software (aka, glacial with a few notable exceptions).
Fairphone wanted to give users full access on the Fairphone 2, but were contractually disallowed if they wanted to also ship the Android Market, Google Maps, etc., which users can't otherwise install themselves so it was essential to pre-install for a normal user experience. That's why they made two OSes for that phone: a googleful one and a free OS based on AOSP that you can install if you don't want Google (https://code.fairphone.com/projects/fairphone-2/fairphone-op...). Nowadays they let the /e/ Foundation do that work with e/OS. They're supportive of it but apparently don't have the internal manpower to continue making and supporting an extra distribution