The Paperwork (and Money) Between Me and Twenty People
It started with Google deciding that sideloading needed a gate. Not Play Store curation — that's old news, that's the deal you always made with the Store. This is different: I own the phone. I paid for it. Android's entire decade-long pitch against Apple was built on the idea that owning the hardware meant you got to decide what ran on it, not a walled garden deciding for you — that's the whole reason "hand a friend an APK and they install it" used to just work. Now the operating system itself checks whether the developer behind that APK has been vetted before it'll let you use the thing you bought. Doesn't matter if you're on the Store. Doesn't matter if you're one guy sharing a game with one friend. The OS checks first. That's the thing that kicked all of this off. Everything after is just what happens when you go looking for the exit and find out there isn't one — there's a fee, on top of the one I already paid years ago to b...