If you haven’t seen this yet, Google is planning to require mandatory developer identity verification for all Android apps, including apps distributed outside the Play Store, taking effect September 2026. This affects every independent and open source Android developer directly.
This is not just about the Play Store. After September 2026, on any certified Android device, applications from unverified developers will be blocked by default. The only proposed bypass, the “advanced flow”, exists only as a blog post and has not appeared in any beta, dev preview, or canary release. No one outside Google has seen it.
The community has been fighting back at keepandroidopen.org:
- Read the full breakdown of what this means
- Sign the open letter (organisations only)
- Contact your national regulators — contacts listed by country on the site
- Add the countdown banner to your project
September 2026 is closer than it looks. The time to push back is now.
I don’t care for cardless payments, but I do use internet banking, you cannot do without at least here, and government apps too are useful and doing with out is just… Impossible.
Mobile banking is mandatory here, if not able to do mobile banking then you can use non free SMS messages, which sucks.
Government apps mandatory I mean that without, you are cut from most digital government services, which is not practical at all. Survivable, but a pain.