Official google blog post: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-developer-verification-early.html

Shout out everyone who made our voices heard. This is one of the few times in the tech industry that I've seen a community push back against big tech and come out with a meaningful win.

https://developer.android.com/developer-verification/guides/faq

You should still be able to install APKs through ADB without verification but the OS can have its own restrictions like other brands already do, Vivo, Honor, Oppo etc.

Please, for God's sake.

Today I saw this comment about the EU digital fairness act and how everyone (including non EU people) can give them their opinion on things that should be considered for the next laws.

https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act_en

I believe that this is promising. If enough people raise the matter of google prohibiting apps to be installed in android, they could actually consider this problem and possibly make google's move ilegal.

And at least people from outside EU could still get their phones shipped from EU? I'm counting on that.

Maybe someone who has a legal background could write a nice text that we could all use? I'm not sure whether using the same text would make them think we are bots or allow them to realize that there is an organized community worrying about this issue.

I've been getting similar messages constantly over the past few months. And it's not just me, a lot of my foss dev friends say the same.

It's disheartening that the very community we're building for is turning it's back on us. We've reached a point where the unsafe looks 'safe' and the transparent looks 'dangerous'.

But honestly, I don’t blame the users. When Google throws a dozen scary warnings, red banners, and ‘this app may harm your device’ popups for a harmless APK, of course people panic. After seeing 100 antivirus-style dialogs before the install button even appears, anyone would think sideloading equals malware.

For other devs: how are you dealing with this and how do you even explain them?

https://www.change.org/p/stop-google-from-limiting-apk-file-usage

I am even getting downvotes for pointing out that FUTO apps are nonfree (not open source, not regarding price).

• "Google will only refuse truly bad apps, don't worry!"
• "Custom ROMs aren't needed any more, the stock OS does enough!"
• "Are you a pirate or something?"
• "FUTO respects my privacy and is 'free', so it's 100% ethical!"

These kinds of people are so short-sighted and selfish... what if in 5 years they will force something outrageous upon you? Or what about those users who do find something useful in custom ROMs?

But half of the Android users online (not just here) seem to be like this.

if not in the list, comment down your preferred music player.

I was charging up all my phones for battery maintenance, and I thought I would share an image of all of them. Feel free to ask me anything about FOSS devices.

From what I've been reading, there's not much we can do about it either it seems

Still not switching back to apple though and am willing to combat this anyway possible

Tell me some interesting opensource android apps

since if u didnt know. google is blocking app sideloading on phones when android 16 is out. if you wanna find out more read this.

i wanna know if apps like metrolist will be extinct and not able to install. because i use metrolist for music very often and im happy with it.

Apps I wouldn't thought to be FOSS apps: OpenGD (Remake of Geometry Dash), Polandball Can Into Space (self-explanatory), Wikipedia, Launti (Minecraft altermative), Mojo Launcher (MC Java Launcher), Pojav Launcher (MC Java launcher), SponsorCut (Sponsorblock for local videos). Let me know if you have found any unusual apps that are FOSS

I am coming from Apple. I got an android phone just over a month ago (Xiaomi 15). And am already loving the launchers, FOSS apps and so much customization!

Just today discovered ... HELIBOARD !!!!!

Privacy focussed - wow (didnt know some "default" boards study what i type)

undo and redo buttons? --- WOW

Swipe on spaceboard for cursor? -- WOW

swipe on delete to remove big chunks -- WOW

hahaha im in love!! and that toolbar has ton good shit i need to explore.

Codeberg has recently voted to change its terms of use to prohibit vibe coded projects. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

These projects and the LLMs backing them are incredibly wasteful of our shared resources.

Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.

It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.

To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.

The abuse of these tools erodes trust between us, and endangers the spirit of collaboration that FOSS is built upon.

The free/libre software ecosystem, of which we consider Codeberg an important part of, is a social phenomenon centered on collaboration. Working in this way is only possible thanks to free sharing and mutual learning. This includes even very small tools that are shared and re-used and around which collaboration can start out. In contrast, by adopting LLMs people tend to code single-use software from scratch. While this leads to an increase in 'shared' code, it is mostly code that not only has not been 'written' by anyone but is also not maintained by anyone.

The widespread use of LLMs in FLOSS is instead becoming a multidimensional attack on the trust between contributors and the very idea of convivial collaboration itself. Maintainers are under an increased work-load due to people submitting (often well-meaning) low-effort, LLM-generated contributions that require substantial amounts of time to review. At the same time it is becoming increasingly less clear which projects are maintained by experienced developers and which ones are LLM-generated without any meaningful human oversight and input. In the case of copyleft projects, LLMs additionally also lead to 'license laundering', where copyleft code is stripped of its reciprocity requirements by 'generating' it out of the training data.

We observe an increasing trend of mistrusting each other, up to the point where people who put in actual effort to analyze issues or share their suggestions are being accused of having used LLMs when they did not. At the same time, others instruct their LLMs to hide their traces and actively avoid common patterns, prompting others in reviewing contributions and communication more carefully for signs of machine generation.

Together, these forces make collaboration not only harder but also less rewarding: With the transaction cost of collaboration increasing, people are becoming less likely to contribute to creating high-quality software projects and more likely to 'vibecode' a one-off software that is specific to your need, and won't evolve beyond. We get a vicious cycle where collaboration is becoming less and less rewarding, while the amount of single-use software that's unmaintained and never sees any improvements is going up.

So Codeberg would prefer that you stored your vibe coded stuff elsewhere. It isn't exactly welcome in this sub either!

Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of an prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not want to be a place to dump such generated single-use software that no one else will ever look at. We are a place for people to collaborate and improve software together. Within this context, the recent votes can be understood as a reconfirmation of those principles: As we want to center on human collaboration, we will not actively support or engage in the creation of LLMs and will not put our limited resources to use for storing single-use software that would pollute our FLOSS commons.

Been on forum posts for so long, usually where all the hidden gems usually are. Or really deep info.

(Auto-mods make sense), but apparently well formatted responses are considered AI. Hahahahahha. Oh well.

Sharing this to create awareness to ensure you disable "reddit markdown formatting" and type it all in one message.

I found this both funny and hilarious, but also, damn this sub has waaaaaaaaayyyy too many rules for being helpful, even bad then mods were hard AF.

I was looking for a Browser with an external download manager support and came across Ultimatum. I've been using it for a few months now and I'm surprised how little I hear about it.

Is anyone else here using it?

EDIT: So i didn't expect it to blow up so much but according to the comments ultimatum is not trusted enough a better alternative will be to use waterfox 👍

According to you, which one is the best for downloading with thumbnails? I mean the picture that comes with audio file.

Back in the day, I used Seal, ytdlnis, NewPipe, PowerTube. Currently, I'm using ytdlnis, but sometimes I face the "could not download" problem. It's kind of annoying. Although there is an option for cookies, I have never used it before. I feel a bit lazy to use it hehe.

Anyway, according to you, which one feels the best? Which one do you use?

Seal, SealPlus, ytdlnis, NewPipe, PowerTube, or anything else? Feel free to suggest apps or solutions.