I'm usually very supportive of EU tech regulation, but to be honest I don't really want to put my name and address up on apps I throw up on the store

Would like to keep my identity separate to whatever projects I have usually, especially if they're ones that don't 100% align with the your own developer brand that employers might screen for

I have the same mentality as you. But, rather than form an opinion on whatever EU regulation is being interpreted as "requiring" these steps from Google et al, I think I'm going to assert that it's a red herring.

The real issue, IMO, is that it's still too hard to distribute and install applications on my general-purpose computing devices! You can't be on Google's app store if you aren't a "real business" with a physical address and everything? Fine. Let's just distribute our apps on F-Droid, or by just releasing APKs in our GitHub pages, etc.

At least that's still possible with Android. But who knows how much longer they'll even allow that?

Yeah, if you have a market that can be installed by the user without passing through a marketplace. The EU regulation gets blamed, but that's not the actual issue.

I think the issue may be thinking of your phone, running a non-open OS, as a general-purpose computing device.

Presumably F-Droid is subject to the same regulatory requirements, so in this case it is directly the regulation to blame.

F-Droid isn’t in the same business, and doesn’t sell apps, so it’s not subject to the same regulatory requirements.

F-Droid has apps with the "ads" anti-feature, so this probably applies to them.

I think it’d apply to the app owner. F-Droid isn’t in the advertising business either, doesn’t get any revenue.

That feature flag just changes what is allowed to appear in search results.

The DSA applies to

> all online intermediaries and platforms operating within the EU

Yawn.

That's probably where F-Droid is a better choice in the first place ?

Google Play (and the App store) assume by default commercial intent, and I'm sympathetic to stricter verification rules when there's money changing hands.

From what I can tell, this all should apply only to monetized apps (and I agree with that). If that's not actually the case, Google is using malicious compliance to misguide developers into hating the EU for daring to regulate them.

> I don't really want to put my name and address up on apps I throw up on the store

As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong, call them out publicly, or at least avoid their products. In no way is it reasonable that someone should want to stay anonymous while selling me something (or profiting off of it in one way or another). I really don't see a reason to make an exception for people who have free+offline+etc apps.

You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.

This punishes the people who release apps for free or open source. For the money generating app farms it doesn't slow them down at all.

> You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.

"Because I want to be able to sue you" is not a particularly compelling line of reasoning for legislating incredibly invasive laws.

> As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong,

John Doe ?

It is always true that people love regulation until it ends up affecting them negatively, through the magic of unintended consequences and emergent phenomenon in complex systems like human societies and economies.

My personal phone number is listed on Google play because I could not get my business number verified. I tried for weeks.

Almost the same here until they let us verify by document. Can't receive texts to our support number, and also can't get the verification code by phone since there is a "Press 1 for ___" thing at the beginning of the call.

Yep, this is why I dropped out.

This effectively kills apps that are made by individuals or very small businesses that can't afford an office.

It's kind of incredible how the EU makes changes like this and then politicians scratch their heads about the weakness of European tech. You would think that the politicians would give some thought to that and make it easier/cheaper to fulfill these requirements, but nope. Either pay up for a company (hundreds of euros) and an office (hundreds of euros) or just have your information publicly available.

And when that information becomes publicly available you will be inundated with spam.

On top of that some services will then take Google street view pictures of your home and link all of that information together in an easily searchable database.

Apparently you can use a P.O. Box as address for this purpose[0] when registering for AppStore, which is substantially cheaper. However, Reddit says Google does not accept P.O. Boxes [1], so the only option is a "virtual" office address or something like that. A shame.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/FlutterDev/comments/1f4nmny/comment...

> the EU makes changes like this

The actual change is not by the EU, but by Google who interprets a EU directive and decides how to apply it to its platform.

This is a big difference, in that the EU requires a verified _contact_ address for _traders_ operating on a marketplace.

From there Google deciding to blanket require onerous verification on anyone publishing any app is Google's call and they should get the blame for it.

For comparison you get a different application of the same rules on the AppStore, and none of that for F-Droid.

Well, if it's easier for Google to require it of everyone instead of a subset (and less risky if they should happen to miss someone who's not a "trader"), then it is entirely reasonable to blame it on the EU.

Before the rule was put in place by the EU, Google didn't require it; after they did. I'm sure Google didn't go through the design, development, testing, compliance and legal analysis of deploying this requirement for the fun of it.

This would be a stronger argument if Google had a track record of caring about their devs, partners and proper business practices.

At this point it's not that far from anthropomorphising the lawnmower.

Doesn't Steam do the same thing? And even registering a company in (some) EU countries has effectively the same address requirement where a PO box is not allowed.

Also, when I said "changes like this" I mean changes in general where there seems to be no analysis on the knock-on effects of a policy change causes.

Another example from the EU was their VAT change they did some years ago. On the surface it was a decent change, because it made multinationals pay VAT in the countries of the buyers, but it had the downside that it drowned small and micro businesses in so much paperwork that a lot of them shut down or stopped serving customers in other EU countries.

Why? Because they forgot to add a minimum threshold for when these VAT rules apply. Something that most EU countries have. Imagine you start selling 3D models, your revenue is €500 in a year and for this money you're expected to file with 27 different tax authorities who all deal mainly in a different language. Is the €10 sale worth dealing with the Latvian tax authority?

It took the EU about 5-6 years to finally fix this by introducing a €10,000 exemption.

> registering a company in (some) EU countries has effectively the same address requirement where a PO box is not allowed.

Justifying rules for a private virtual marketplace as being as strict as how the government handles registrations is going overboard IMHO. That's like arguing that Supermarkets are fine fingeprinting customers when emiting loyalty cards because the host country also fingeprints people when emiting passports. They're not the same thing.

> It took the EU about 5-6 years to finally fix this by introducing a €10,000 exemption.

Wasn't the rule introduced in 2021 ? Getting a fix applied within a few years is actually not bad for an international governing entity IMHO.

On the other side, Stripe Tax also launched in 2021, so small businesses had that as a solution if it wasn't worth their time dealing with each countries individually.

Sure the rules could have been optimized from the start, but it doesn't sound half as bad as you make it sound to me (albeit I'm not an expert in any of this)

Yup. Malicious compliance.

> It's kind of incredible how the EU makes changes like this

Haha, how perverse from Google to blame the EU. Google just want more data from you.

Several FOSS apps of mine were removed from Google Play because of this. I wrote about one solution for other affected developers here:

https://rocket9labs.com/post/on-the-importance-of-f-droid/

Agreed. My 3 free apps, one with +100k downloads were also removed because of the EU ruling. Don't want my personal address and phone number to be more accessible to bad actors more than it already is. While I can somewhat follow the idea, the execution in practice has serious flaws.

> were also removed because of the EU ruling.

It has nothing to do with EU. see jwz.

Doesn't Apple require this too? (https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co...)