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.
I highly doubt any power users will move to IOS. IOS is far more limiting than even a locked down Android. Graphene is a far more likely candidate, though I suspect most will just stick to normal Android with unverified apps enabled as they have their phones configured today. This change is really just an added 24hr delay to the existing process of enabling unverified app installation. If Google had just announced it this way I suspect there wouldn’t have been so much pushback. But instead it was rumored that unverified installation would only allowed over adb which would absolutely be too much friction with little security benefit.