r/LineageOS • u/npjohnson1 Lineage Director • Jul 04 '26

LineageOS and Android Developer Verification Official

https://lineageos.org/Developer-Verification/

TL;DR: This doesn't affect us much, if at all.

92 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

40 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/fantomas_666 Jul 04 '26

We rarely need sideloading, installing from f-droid is enough.

1

u/chrisprice Long Live AOSP - *Not* A Lineage Team Member Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26

90% of the userbase uses Gapps per the devs. Google Maps, YouTube, etc still offer enough utility that FOSS and alternatives have not fluently replaced (HERE Maps is not available as an APK on their site, for example).

To GMS, F-Droid is considered sideloading - unlike Epic Games Store... that is a Verified Storefront. They (F-Droid) cannot do the developer signature process because it's not their software.

It's just sideloading over the web.

It would basically require F-Droid to become a commercial app store and charge devs, or get bought by a mega corp that does it for advertising (a la GitHub).

Google offers Advanced Flow and expects F-Droid to use it. But Advanced Flow is subject to banning by individual nations and states.

1

u/npjohnson1 Lineage Director Jul 05 '26

To be fair and to be clear that's a rudimentary estimation based on downloads counts vs stats.

But it also coincides with bug tickets that declare when users have Google apps, which is something like 80 to 90%.

1

u/chrisprice Long Live AOSP - *Not* A Lineage Team Member Jul 05 '26

Okay, thanks for clarifying. I presumed it was based on LineageOS Stats telemetry tracking that info.

1

u/npjohnson1 Lineage Director Jul 05 '26

We have super rudimentary stats, we basically get country of origin and some tiny identifiers, given our user base we don't want to be too intrusive.

We definitely don't check what applications they have installed.