Your Phone Is Becoming a Rental You Never Agreed To

There’s a change coming to Android that most people won’t notice until it’s already happened. Starting September 2026, Google will require every app developer to register with them, sign a contract, pay a fee, and hand over government-issued ID before their app can be installed on Android devices. No registration, no install. Not even via sideloading, which is just a word the industry invented to make “installing software” sound like something edgy and irresponsible.

We’ve been installing software on computers for fifty years without asking anyone’s permission. Nobody required you to dox yourself to Microsoft before you could run an executable. The reframing of this as “sideloading” is doing a lot of quiet work, and most people haven’t noticed.

The stated justification is security. Fewer malicious apps, verified developers, a cleaner store. And look, I’ll give it half a point: there is genuine garbage on the Play Store, and some of it is actively harmful. But the App Store exists, Apple requires this already, and the App Store still has scam apps. Verified identity does not equal trustworthy software. These are different things.

What this actually does is eliminate anonymous and pseudonymous software distribution on mobile. That means no more F-Droid. No more small open-source tools published by a developer who’d rather not hand their passport to a trillion-dollar American corporation. No more apps where you can actually inspect the source code and verify what it’s doing. The argument that this is a “nothing burger” only holds if you think the current arrangement, where Google controls what software runs on the device you own, is fine. Some people do think that. I don’t.

The comment that landed hardest for me came from someone pointing out the obvious thing nobody wants to say plainly: this isn’t about security. It’s about control and data. Google wants to know who is publishing to their platform. Of course they do. That information is valuable.

I’ve been thinking about this from a different angle. My daughter uses her phone for everything. School apps, messaging, a couple of games, some utilities her school recommends that have nothing to do with the Play Store. She has no idea what an APK is. Most people don’t, and that’s fine. But the consequence of that normalised ignorance is that decisions like this get made quietly, pushed silently in an update, and the majority of users never get to weigh in. The choice was already made for them.

The Linux phone conversation is real but still pretty rough around the edges. The hardware driver problem is genuinely the blocker, not a lack of enthusiasm. Until manufacturers open-source their drivers, you’re building on sand. And even if you get a working Linux phone tomorrow, most of the apps people actually need, banking, transport, healthcare, won’t run on it. So the theoretical exit exists, but it isn’t practically available to most people yet.

There’s an antitrust angle here too. The EU has been the main entity willing to push back on this kind of behaviour, but right now the EU has other things on its mind and the current US administration isn’t exactly rushing to rein in its own tech companies. So we’re probably waiting a while on that front, and Google is presumably fine with paying a fine eventually if the underlying control structure remains intact.

I don’t know where this ends. I genuinely don’t. What I do know is that “you own this device” is becoming a polite fiction, and we’re all just getting used to it incrementally. Each step is small enough to be defensible on its own. The cumulative effect is that the thing in your pocket, the one you paid for, increasingly does what someone else decides.

That’s worth being clear-eyed about, even if there’s no tidy fix.