The Play Integrity API was never meant to detect fraudulent apps, but to make it easy for google to become the arbiter of what's trustworthy and what's not. They knew this of course, but this lawsuit indicates they might have something solid to stand on. Good luck GrapheneOS!

I feel like a huge aspect that this article and the GrapheneOS developers are overlooking is DRM content.

They're focusing on user security for a user's own data, but there's a whole other side to it with companies wanting to protect their own data - think Netflix and the like who use the same systems to ensure that nobody's been tampering with the device as a way of bypassing the copy protection of their media.

Now I'm not saying I support DRM at all, I'm very firmly in the camp of being able to own the media you purchase without restriction, but my point is that it's not as simple as Google being dismissive, lazy or ignorant but rather there's a lot of commercial sensitivity at play and if Google fucks it up, they could potentially lose certification of the entire android ecosystem.

Google is just trying to be Malus but on multiple vendors' hardware and across all variations of iOS (if iOS allowed forks). Obviously that's a problem and it wouldn't surprise me if Epic joined the lawsuit. Their third-party app store would have a problem installing authentic apps from the Google Play Store if no google services ran on the phone.

The EU is doing stuff against monopolies and talking about digital sovereignty, but EU countries are still releasing the opensource software only on the google playstore and ios app store - that's not sovereign.

Very curious to see where this goes.

Anti Commercial-AI license