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 get that you can get around this but there are 2 major problems I see.
Google now has a flag on my phone they can control remotely to keep me from accessing the apps I want to use.
Alternative app stores like F-Droid will never be any more popular than they are today. This raises the barrier to entry so much that we can effectively consider the open source phone app movement to be dead in the water.