Letter to EU administriation and members of European parliament about keeping android open

Subject: Keep Android Open

To all concerned parties,

(FYI, I will also publish this text on my blog at https://dynatrop.es)

Google, the company, and main developer of the Android mobile phone operating system has unilaterally declared in August 2025 to start enforcing “mandatory developer registration as a requirement for building and distributing Android applications worldwide”. This applies to so-called Android Certified devices, “which constitute[s] over 95% of all Android-compatible devices outside of China).

This is bad for developers, consumers, and society. Why is that?

Healthy ecosystems depend on diversity and this move will sharply decrease diversity. How? Many niche use-case apps that are developed by private or low-resource developers will simply vanish, because these developers can not afford the additional financial and administrative overheads.

The planned developer registration creates a central choke point that is under jurisdictive control of the US. Besides plain unpredictability, the predictable part of disdain for reason, enlightenment, democracy, and any liberal values that is clearly exhibited by the current administration, makes this an undesirable jurisdiction to control our mobile digital infrastructure.

It opens the doors for censorship and exposes developers and users to the whims of Google’s own discretion, which they have previously freely exerted to ban apps “they don’t like” from their App Store. Most recently, they have ducked to the US government’s calls and removed apps for citizen monitoring of the freewheeling fascist goon troupe ICE.

European digital sovereignity is just an empty joke if the relevant regulators will not act on this swiftly and decisively.

Let’s have a look at the motivation Google puts forward on their part: it is to stop bad actors that impersonate brands on said App Store, potentially misleading consumers.

This might well be so, but the proposed remedy is anything but. As is well known, highly motivated bad actors with large resources will easily game and circumvent these newly introduced procedures for their purposes, whereas all civic, amateur, and low-resource actors will be stopped short of their exclusively beneficial activity. We call this a lose-lose situation.

In order to live up to their responsibility Google will have to do better and simply put in the cost and effort on their part to redact and vet apps uploaded to the app store.

It also means a retroactive dispossession of consumers of previously purchased values. Technically enabled by always-on connectedness, tech monopolies have cultivated the abusive practice of changing the terms of use in their favor, after the fact of a consumer purchasing a given product. The practice leads to the product changing its function (usually degrading) after purchase, again in a unilateral way. This is generally unacceptable, and has been well documented under the term “enshittification”.

To be specific, Google’s proposed change concerns sideloading, “their pejorative term for the direct and unintermediated installation of software of your choosing on the device that you own”, which will not be possible if they move ahead.

Bad effects do not stop with single consumers though, but will also affect the general resilience of our economy and society, as “future app store competitors, be they commercial or non-profit, will forever be disadvantaged by their developers being required to sign up with Google, bound to their (voluminous, non-negotiable, and ever-changing) terms and conditions, pay a fee, upload government-issued identification, and register each and every one of their applications with Google”.

These are just a few aspects of the proposed change, and as said in the beginning, none of it is good for us, our economic health & resilience, and thus our society at large.

I am looking forward to have your written confirmation of receiving my complaint.

Thank you for your time & effort, best regards

Dr. Oswald Berthold (computer scientist, roboticist, F-Droid user in Berlin, Germany)

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