alt Hacker NewsWelp, I guess my current Android phone will be my last one.
At least half of the apps I use on a daily basis come from f-droid. This enforced 24-hour wait is simply not acceptable. Android has always been a far inferior overall user experience compared to iPhone. Android's _only_ saving grace was that I could put my own third-party open-source apps on it. There is nothing left keeping me on Android now.
I'll probably get an iPhone next, but I do sincerely hope this hastens progress on a real "Linux phone" for the rest of us. Plasma Mobile (https://plasma-mobile.org) looks very nice indeed. I'll be more than happy to contribute to development and funding.
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If it helps, the 24-hour wait is a one-time process. You do it once, click the toggle to allow installing unregistered apps indefinitely, and then install whatever you want. You can even turn off developer options afterwards, per my understanding, and it won't impact your ability to install unregistered apps.
GrapheneOS phones are still an option, it’s unaffected by these rules.
What I'm about to say is probably going to be contraversial: but I think this is (long term) a good thing for opensource/freedom. The whole idea of 'apps' on a device that sits in your pocket and has access to a whole range of personal information was from the start, a bad idea. We have seen countless cases of 'verified apps' from the Playstore which hoover up all your personal data without your consent. I believe Steve Job's original plan for the iPhone was for apps to be web-based. This is good as web browsers run all the potentially dangerous code within a sandbox, with very restricted access to the host system's resources (storage, cameras, etc). Web technology has come a long way and even allows for GPU accelerated content to be used, and it's only getting better.
Phones, by their nature, are always internet connected (obviously there are instances where that isn't the case)...so if 90% of my apps are actually just web apps then that's fine. The opensource aspect of this should be: I build and run my own infrastructure (on cloud servers or my own servers) that serves up the web apps.
Sure, this isn't something that 'normal' people would do...but they aren't side loading apps anyway.
The web is decentralised, as long as we choose it to be. We need to take advantage of this property.
24-hour wait is a one time setup, I'd imagine that fdroid will keep working as usual after this super hidden don't enable me option is enabled.
If I understand correctly, the 24 hour wait is a one off. After the sideloading feature is enabled, it should stay on.
Good luck installing things from anywhere you want on an iPhone.
Probably f droid will become an official app store recognized by Google, and then you won't have to go through this flow to install f droid or its apps.
Switching to an iPhone will put you in an even worse walled garden that respects you even less. Even simple things like setting your default navigation app in iOS are gated behind moving to the EU.