Back in my day, Google was known primarily for one particular motto:

Don't Be Evil.

Nowadays? Well... Google has long since removed that motto from their websites, marketing, and brand in general. I would always say, "Google is now 'Let's Be Neutral'". Since then, Google has made decision after decision after decision - and I think I'm finally ready to accept that Google... is Evil.

I could spend time writing about all of the various moves made by Google that affected their user-base negatively - I could even talk about the invasive theft of the personal data of yours and mine. But what tossed the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back:

Taking away my freedom to do with my device, that I purchased, whatever the fudge-cake I want to do with my fudgin' device!

But let me calm down and explain. Google has made the decision to begin rolling out, next year, locking down any "unverified apps" - by way of apps made by "unverified developers" to not be capable of being installed on android devices - even if you've enabled developer mode and enabled installing APK (android app files) files from unknown sources.

You might be thinking: "Okay, but why is that a bad thing? It sounds like they're taking security seriously, no?" Well, not really. Say you purchased a car, and you want to change your own oil. Of course, the manufacturer can advise you to take it in and let someone else do it for you at a higher price - and hopefully they do the job well - but you can do it yourself, right? Now say if you went to change your own oil but end up finding you need to insert a proprietary connection tool that digitally enters some kind of passcode that the dealer owns in order to unlock the oil cap. We'd all – well, I hope we'd all – consider that completely absurd and asinine.

From my perspective there's much more going on behind the scenes. No everyday Joe Smoe, Mary Sue, or Raven Dragonrider would have been enabling their devices to side-load unknown sourced apps to begin with. And for the handful that do, and may have compromised themselves... well that's on them. You have to enable developer mode on your device, acknowledge a message about doing so, go into the dev settings, and then manually opt-in to allow unknown sourced apps to be installed.

So who in the ever-lovin' world is this "protecting"!? It doesn't make sense from a fundamental approach of "protection". What it does make sense for is targeting a specific set of savvy users who can exploit both paid apps, as well as protect from giving Google more of your data.

So - the exploiting of paid apps is just referring to piracy, yeah? Essentially being about to take an apk file of a paid file and distribute it for free against the terms of the developers. Often times, though, such exploits could be just people looking to restore an older version that avoids a bug, or an update that added an invasive feature. Such a work-around is often done through markets/archives like APK-Mirror, or APK-Pure. Which Google does not control.

However - I don't think that's specifically what Google wants to target, no, what I think is that Google wants to hit markets such as "F-Droid" for taking users away from Play Store.

Ultimately I'm pissed with this announcement (if it wasn't obvious). I'm expecting a large spike in AOSP (Android Open Source Project) forks... I'm hoping it brings a new wave of motivation and inspiration for new operating systems and new blood in the industry.

In the meantime - we have until next year until Google plans to begin rolling this out in non-US countries first. Take the time to prepare as needed. I'll be trying to peep my eyes at RISC-V for time being.

• Google's Android Developer Blog