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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

The impact is a direct threat to independent AOSP distributions like Murena's e/OS/ (which I'm personally using).

I don't think this is true, right? An AOSP build can just decide to still allow installing arbitrary APKs. Also see this post from the GrapheneOS team:

https://mastodon.social/@GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social/116103...

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You can’t really do that long-term as Google will change code that will not match however you are not enforcing this policy

So at the very least you’d have to keep patches up to date.

Long term divergence could be enough that’s it’s just a hard fork and/or Google changes so much that the maintainer can’t keep the patches working at the same pace

I couldn’t read your link as it asks to join mastodon.social

The patch set for graphene is substantial, this is a relatively minor change.

All distributions involve maintaining patch sets. The question is what the marginal burden of this particular patch is.

Doesn't require me to sign in or create account...

I had the mastodon app installed and it was doing that. After I uninstalled it opened in the browser just fine.

But that just sounds the big community demanding this has to put together a proper KDE-like team to maintain Android in the way they want instead of waiting on Google's code?

The enforcement mechanism is in Google Play Services, not AOSP. To laypeople the difference doesn't matter but to folks looking for alternatives it does, so the discussion is often muddied and imprecise. This is like when YouTube removed public dislike counts and it turned into "they're removing the dislike button!"

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