Plus, in my experience, SIM cards are software-dependent, so I'm pretty sure that under most phone plans, a third party Android client wouldn't work as a phone. Which, like, I'm sorry, but "dephoning" is a lot of extra expense and e-waste and simply not practical. It's posturing, not an activist statement.

I looked into the "sustainable smartphones" before settling on Moto for being a relatively low-nonsense Android fork, but found that they don't work on reasonably priced North American phone plans, or in some cases, any at all. Plus if you need to order the replacement parts from overseas, that kinda removes the environmental benefit.

damn this sucks so much 😢

good news is that you should still be able to download things direct from APK if you load them in browser / on your desktop long as sideloading apps is enabled in phone settings, which even iOS still lets you do I think with direct download if you know where to look

I know that most android phones (even google pixel), you can open as drives and copy files directly to / from on Windows and Linux, so that's always an option as long as you can download APKs directly on desktop. hopefully APKMirror and pals step up to preserve emulators, F-Droid, etc.

if you want to be able to install apps straight from web browser, you should be able to enable "install unknown apps" or something of that sort in app settings for your browser of choice. you may need to also enable installing apps from APK in developer options depending on your specific phone model. on most droids, if you go into "about phone" and click the build number a bunch of times it'll enable developer option

Do we have a date for when the verification is happening, so folks know to install emulators etc. before then? (thinking about flappy bird getting kicked off the app store back in the day and the market in phones with it already installed)

while this indisputably sucks, since that's the main thing Android had over iOS, I suspect that direct APK downloads will continue to work indefinitely because of their importance to development, so get your faves onto APK Mirror and other databases if they aren't already!

@draggianuniverse thanks for the advice. i might start doing that

Looks like it will be implemented september 2026 for users in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, then globally in 2027.