Google's concerns about security rings hollow to me. I believe it is strictly to exercise more control over the platform.
The appeals to people in Southeast Asia being scammed reminds me of a blog by Cory Doctorow last year: Every complex ecosystem has parasites [1]
The gist of it is that technology can be useful, but that usefulness comes with a price: sometimes bad actors are going to commit fraud or other undesirable actions.
As an example, you can reduce the amount of banking app scams to 0% by simply denying any banking apps on phones. But because of banking apps' usefulness we're not going to do that, so there will be some non-zero risk that you will get scammed.
As a technical user I chose Android for its usefulness, accepting that there may be a (minute) chance that I get scammed, but it is a risk I am willing to take, and Google will unilaterally take this choice away from me.
Still, I don't believe Google's security concerns are sincere, so I think I just wasted my time typing all of this
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/
The appeals to people in Southeast Asia being scammed reminds me of a blog by Cory Doctorow last year: Every complex ecosystem has parasites [1]
The gist of it is that technology can be useful, but that usefulness comes with a price: sometimes bad actors are going to commit fraud or other undesirable actions.
As an example, you can reduce the amount of banking app scams to 0% by simply denying any banking apps on phones. But because of banking apps' usefulness we're not going to do that, so there will be some non-zero risk that you will get scammed.
As a technical user I chose Android for its usefulness, accepting that there may be a (minute) chance that I get scammed, but it is a risk I am willing to take, and Google will unilaterally take this choice away from me.
Still, I don't believe Google's security concerns are sincere, so I think I just wasted my time typing all of this
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/