Who decides what you can install

On Android you get this app as a file we publish, or from our own repository in F-Droid. Nobody stands between us and your phone today. From 2027 Google intends to, and this page says what changes, what it costs you, and the one thing it cannot reach. It is here because you should hear it from us before you meet it at an install prompt.

What Google is changing

Google is introducing developer verification for apps installed on certified Android devices, meaning the ordinary phones that ship with Google's services on them. A developer who wants an app to install normally has to register an identity, the app's package name and its signing key, which for full distribution means a Google account, a fee and a government-issued ID.

Four countries are covered from 30 September 2026, and only for installs from participating app stores, so nothing about that first phase touches this app. The phase that does is the global one, from 2027, which Google describes as covering all certified devices running Android 7 or later.

What it costs you if we do not register

The app stays installable. Google's own description keeps a route for an app from an unverified developer, and it runs like this: turn on developer mode, pass a check that you are not being talked through the steps by somebody else, restart the phone and sign in again, wait 24 hours, confirm with a fingerprint, a face or a PIN, and then accept a warning.

That is once per phone rather than once per app, and afterwards anything installs normally. So for somebody who chose their phone carefully it is an afternoon's annoyance. For the ordinary way a messenger spreads, which is one person telling another to install it so they can talk, a day's wait sits directly across the path. We would rather say that plainly than have you find out with a friend on the other end of it.

A phone without Google's services is outside all of it

None of this reaches a device that is not certified. On a phone running Android without Google's services there is no Play Protect and no verification check, because the mechanism only exists where Google's services do. If you are reading this on a degoogled phone, the whole section above is somebody else's problem.

What it does not change

The signing key stays ours. Verification registers which key belongs to which package; it does not hand Google custody of the key or let Google sign in our place. That distinction is the reason this app is served from our own F-Droid repository rather than listed on f-droid.org, which rebuilds and signs with its own key, and it survives intact.

Nothing here touches a message. No part of the Android app talks to a Google service: there is no Firebase, no Play Services and no push service, so the phone holds its own connection to the relay and no notification passes a Google machine. What Google can learn is that the app is on the phone, which the metadata page sets out alongside everything else that is observable.

The iPhone, for comparison

Apple has required this all along and goes further. The app reaches an iPhone only because Apple reviewed it and Apple distributes it, on a paid yearly membership with identity checks, and there is no sideloading to fall back on: no developer mode, no warning to accept, no route at all outside the alternative-distribution programmes, whose thresholds are written for large companies. There is also no Google-free equivalent of an iPhone. What Google is adopting in 2027 is close to the arrangement iOS has always had.

What we have not decided

Whether to register. It is not a large amount of money and the identity checks are ordinary, so the cost is not really the fee: it is that a company would have to be told who publishes this software before it installs cleanly on a phone somebody already owns. We are waiting to see the enforcement details Google has not published yet, and this page will say which way it went rather than quietly reflecting the outcome.

Where these facts come from

Google's own developer documentation on Android developer verification and its help pages for the Android Developer Console, read in September 2026. Given as references rather than links, the same as on how this compares, because this site does not send you anywhere else. If a line here is out of date, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it, see community.