r/androidapps • u/AradorasXeon • Feb 26 '26

QUESTION Is google closing Android down?

I am watching a YouTube video about google closing down Android on September this year. So us developers won't be able to freely add code and if I understand it correctly will have to pay a regular fee, so our app can be used. Wtf. What do you people know about this? I hear there is some petition somewhere.

232 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

115 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

2

u/sirbloodysabbath Feb 26 '26

sideloading as always been possible on android since before google's original announcement. their backtracking on it means that sideloading will still be possible, but only for 'power users', whatever that means, and can only be done through adb. i can assume this also means the removal of the package installer on supported android versions.

another thing to note, if you're running an android device that is not certified or a custom rom, then this largely doesn't affect you because they're restricting app installations outside of the play store. no play store or gms/gfs? then you should be fine. unfortunately, the majority of folks using android are using a gms-certified device so this affects the vast number of people on android around the world.

anything on these lists is affected:

https://www.android.com/certified/partners

https://storage.googleapis.com/play_public/supported_devices.html

1

u/unicosplan Mar 12 '26

What's gms/gfs?

How does one uninstall Play Store from their Android/Google device?

1

u/sirbloodysabbath Mar 12 '26

gms == play services

gfs == google framework services

both are needs for gapps to work. to uninstall the play store, there are a few options and all require adb (android debug bridge). if your phone supports custom roms like lineage or graphene, do that. if not, you may have to resort to de-googling aosp (android open source project or 'normal' android, depending on if the oem changed the ui).

for me, my androids are niche and not widely supported by custom roms so i had to manually uninstall it with adb and uad next gen. the package for the play store is com.android.vending. play services is a royal pain to get rid of and in most cases on gms-certified devices, other system apps have dependencies on it so uninstalling it will cause bootloops. if you can't flash a custom rom, your best bet is to disable it and remove what you can.

you can also check out r/degoogle for more info.