A theoretical way to circumvent Android developer verification

I think this means we need to rely on web technologies more. PWAs are looking pretty good on mobile devices these days and you can publish any web app you want with no reviewing authority. The web has a bunch of crazy APIs now that let you build crazy things and for everything else you're a hosted server away somewhere that can run more complex jobs.

I believe devices I own should let me do whatever I want with them and I agree that the verification is BS, but I'll work around it in the ways I can which means building more for the web.

If that ever drops the open pretense (since both traffic and trust authority are largely centralized and thus easily controllable) then I'll only write for self hosted linux boxes.

We as individuals can only do so much. We'd need actual organization and some measure of political power to do anything more since normal people do not care about this.

I thought Brent Simmons did a great job laying out why PWAs don't work: https://inessential.com/2025/10/04/why-netnewswire-is-not-we...

The tl;dr is that a PWA implies an app which is based in the cloud. So suddenly you need a server, and you need to store user data, which means costs and dealing with privacy and security.

Basically every native app has a server behind it to harvest user data nowadays. So I don’t think it’s an argument for why PWAs won’t work.