Ruminating…

if your going that route.

I see what you did there.

If you expect regular users to go through with this ridiculous process you are just naive. Anyone who distributes their app through something like F-Droid will either, have to choose between going through with giving Google their ID or lose 85% of their users, if they are lucky.

Yes, you do. Unless you are developing an app just for your friends, or you expect everyone not on a custom ROM to go through the ridiculous “advanced flow”.

In addition to the advanced flow we’re building free, limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists. This allows you to share apps with a small group (up to 20 devices) without needing to provide a government-issued ID or pay a registration fee. This ensures Android remains an open platform for learning and experimentation while maintaining robust protections for the broader community.

The above is from the official update by Google.

If you are referring to the suggested “advanced flow” this is what I am referring to as “crazy workaround” in my comment. And in practice that doesn’t mean anything.

Until Google provides a shipping implementation that can be independently verified, our position remains unchanged: all apps from non-registered developers will be blocked once their lockdown goes into effect in September 2026.

It is still going to affect us indirectly. The problem is that Google is demanding developers to go through KYC even if they are not distributing their app through the Play Store. Not going through with it means nobody with a stock device will be able to install their app, unless they do that crazy workaround Google claims is going to implement.

This means open source app developers will be called to choose between doxing themselves to Google, or keep developing for us, the 0.01% who is on custom ROMs. It’s not hard to imagine that many will just decide to move on and invest their time on doing something else.

https://keepandroidopen.org/

You are not voiding any warranty. You can very easily revert back to stock if you need to.

Android itself without the proprietary crap added to it by Google is open source and will continue being so long it keeps using the Linux kernel. This is not going to change as the Linux kernel is licensed under GPL, and if you link against GPL licensed code your own code also has to be licensed under GPL.

The problem GrapheneOS has is not with AOSP going away, but with Google not publishing the device tree for their Pixel devices like they used to, making it impossible to unlock the bootloader, and generally making harder to develop a custom ROM for their devices.

The GrapheneOS team is currently working with an OEM to develop a phone that comes with GrapheneOS from the factory. If that happens and we no longer have to rely on Google hardware for installing it then the problem is solved.

Get a Pixel and install GrapheneOS on it. It is super easy these days, you can do it using just a Chromium based web browser. And don’t worry there is no chance you will brick your device.

One more reason, there is a “copy as cURL” option in the Firefox developer tools network tab. It gives you a perfect cURL command including all the necessary cookies and headers to send the exact HTTP request that your browser just sent.