Android developer verification: Building a safer ecosystem together

(android-developers.googleblog.com)

14 points by ChrisArchitect 4 days ago|6 comments

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nabogh 3 days ago

Any numbers on exactly how much safer the average user will be? How many scams are we stopping here? I don't know anybody outside of technical people who install apps outside the playstore. And what can a malicious app do exactly? They're sandboxed

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pohuing 3 days ago

If you can convince a victim to install an app, you can probably convince them to enable screen overlays, accessibility features etc. Apparently these scams are quite common in South East Asia.

Nevertheless, scammers will just use stolen identities to sign their malware.

This is just a thinly veiled attempt to prevent apps such as ReVanced YouTube or others that ruffle IP holders, such as alphabet.

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lern_too_spel 3 days ago

Stolen identities have the same problem as stolen Google Play publisher credentials. As soon as one scammer who has used an identity is found, the identity is burned, and all the scammers using that identity have to look for another. This is different from self signed certificates that you can create at will.

People like me who use Morphe aren't actually going to be inconvenienced much, so I doubt appeasing IP holders is the motivation.

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pohuing 2 days ago

I expect Google to ban the devs eventually. After all the app's sole purpose is breaking the TOS of YouTube.

Thank you for name dropping Morphe btw, I'll use that for as long as it still works.

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lern_too_spel 2 days ago

Morphe can still self sign. Nothing has changed in that regard. The only thing developer verification adds is the ability to install an app outside a system app store without a warning, but Morphe has always been distributed outside system app stores with a warning.

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nom 3 days ago

I feel safer already.