The Android you loved for its freedom is slipping away — like it or not

There was a time when Android felt like a wide‑open field where power users tinkered, indie devs shipped cool APKs on their own terms, and custom ROMs kept old hardware feeling fresh far past its sell‑by date. But that spirit is fading in ways that are hard to ignore. As someone who’s reported on this ecosystem for years, the trend line reads like a slow tightening of screws — not a single switch flip, but a series of changes that add up to less control for users and more gatekeeping for developers, even as Google says it is about safety and efficiency.

The most consequential shift is happening deep in the plumbing where Android’s open roots live, because Google is now building the OS fully in private and only pushing code to the public tree after major releases, which means external contributors and ROM maintainers are working from snapshots rather than an active trunk, with all the delays and context loss that implies.

In parallel, key Pixel ingredients that once made Pixels the de facto AOSP reference devices are no longer landing in the public repos for Android 16, including device trees, fresh driver binaries, and a full kernel commit history. This will affect custom ROM developers greatly. In fact, the folks behind the privacy-focused GrapheneOS even announced plans to build their own hardware because of Google’s AOSP changes.

And speaking of custom ROMs, towards the end of 2024, many Android enthusiasts even signed a petition to force Google to stop limiting custom ROMs through the Play Integrity API. All this matters because custom ROMs are not a cute hobby on the margins but a mainline way Android has stayed vibrant, with communities like LineageOS breathing new life into devices as old as the Pixel 2 long after official support ends, and clamping down on the materials ROM builders need will slow that pipeline and discourage new contributors who don’t have institutional knowledge to bridge the gaps.

The effect won’t be obvious overnight, yet the cost shows up in longer waits for stable builds, fewer niche devices getting love, and fewer eyes on the code that many of us trust to protect our data when we deliberately choose a privacy‑tuned fork over stock firmware.

If you think that was bad. Here’s another recently announced change that will surely rile you up if you’re an Android enthusiast. Google will soon block installs of apps unless the developer’s identity is verified, even when the app comes from outside the Play Store, and the rollout starts in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand in September 2026 before expanding globally.

The company says this adds accountability without content review, likening it to an ID check rather than a bag search, and it applies to certified devices with Google services while routing verification through a new Android Developer Console that mirrors the Play Console. The process requires personal or organizational documentation, a verified phone number, a linked payments profile, and a one‑time $25 fee that Google says will be waived for students and hobbyists, although the fine print on those exceptions is still evolving ahead of launch.

Android fans are already expressing their anger against the change. Just take this post on X, for example.

You can also participate in the discussion on this thread on the Android subreddit, where it’s clear that people hate the change.

I’ve also watched one of the platform’s signature customization avenues slowly wither: third‑party launchers have never fully recovered from the gesture navigation turn in Android 10. Initially, gesture navigations were completely blocked on third-party launchers. Following that, even when you could use gestures on third-party launchers, the animations remained broken and still are to this date. This pissed me off to a large extent because I would always be tinkering with third-party launchers like Nova Launcher, Action Launcher, Smart Launcher, and many, many more. Google did bring some improvements earlier this year, but it’s still not flawless.

We even highlighted a survey on our sister site, PiunikaWeb, last year, which showed that third-party launchers don’t integrate well with Pixel and other devices.

Of course, there will be defenders who note that Pixels remain easy to unlock and that AOSP code still ships after each major release, and both points are true in a strict sense even as the practical burdens grow for anyone not inside the walls. There will also be sincere arguments that verified identities will reduce fraud and financial harm, and that matters to people who just want safe phones, but those gains should be weighed against the chilling effect on anonymous publishing that has historically been a safety feature for vulnerable developers and users in some contexts. What worries many in the community is not one policy but the shape of the future those policies point to, where Android still calls itself open while meaningful control lives with a single company deciding what is convenient to permit and when outsiders get to see the code that runs on their own hardware.

I personally find this situation oddly familiar. I mean, Google’s reasons for the most part are “security”. It reminds me of how governments in Europe, the US, and even Australia are now using “child safety” as a means to control and regulate what people can and cannot access online without ID proof. Something similar is also happening in the gaming space, with payment processors forcing platforms to censor games.

Overall, it seems like the freedom to use your gadgets the way you want to use them is slowly creeping away. This time around, it’s sideloading that’s going to be regulated; who knows what freedom will be axed the next time around?

That said, feel free to share your thoughts on all this in the comments below.