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.
You should definitely consider the Jolla, but cameras are basically never great on degoogled devices, because flashing a new rom also deletes the OEM proprietary firmware, which was tailor-made for that device. What you get instead is a generic software that never comes close to matching the original quality. I think the hardware makers who sell degoogled phones, like Fairphone, would have chance to make good cameras, but none of them have actual years of experience making cameras, as companies like Samsung and Sony do.
I don’t need fancy processing on my photos as longs as it lets me capture some kind of raw format. For photos that I actually care about the quality, a raw is better anyway.
Well that sucks, a decent camera is basically half of what a smartphone is. The ARM ecosystem is such trash.