[...]

In the new blog post, Google’s Matthew Forsythe confirms that the developer verification system is slated to come online on September 30 of this year. The initial deployment will be limited to countries with a high level of app scams: Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand.

[...]

Google released its new developer console back in March, inviting external developers the opportunity to pay $25 and verify their identities early. Developers who don’t register will find that their apps cannot be sideloaded on Google-certified Android devices once verification has rolled out. Google says that almost every app in the Play Store is now ready for the change, and a “large majority” of apps outside Google Play have completed verification.

[...]

Google says it will verify the apps in the following stores when it begins enforcing the new restrictions.

Google (Google Play)
Honor (HONOR App Market)
OPlus (OPPO App Market)
Samsung (Galaxy Store)
Transsion (Palm Store)
vivo (V-Appstore)
Xiaomi (GetApps)

[...]

The next step toward verifying apps will come this month as Google deploys a new system service on most certified devices. The package (com.google.android.verifier) will appear on phones and tablets running Android 8 or higher, allowing Google to block the installation of unverified apps. It will remain dormant until verification is activated in your specific region.

In July, Google plans to roll out the new developer APIs and begin testing for “limited distribution” accounts. This is Google’s solution for hobbyists who want to make their own apps and share them with a small group. Limited accounts won’t require a fee or government ID verification, but you can install these apps on up to 20 devices.

In August, the advanced flow will become available globally ahead of verification becoming mandatory in the first markets. As detailed a few months ago, the advanced flow will allow users to bypass verification, but the process isn’t easy. You’ll have to navigate to a buried menu, confirm you understand the risks multiple times, and wait a whole day before completing the process.

And that brings us to September, when Android devices in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand will begin checking verification status before installing apps. However, things get murky after that. Google will undoubtedly monitor how verification works as millions of users are suddenly limited to verified apps, which could affect how it moves forward. Google says it intends to expand developer verification in 2027, eventually making it a global device policy.

Hi guys! I'm a bit tired that my system sometimes completely becomes unresponsive while running things that could fill up the memory. I have 32GB of RAM, a bit of a swap file in my SSD (I think something like 5GB swap), but this clearly isn't cutting it. I was having a few browser windows opened, a handbrake encoding that was paused and decided to open Death Stranding 2, which is optimized to take around 5-6GB of RAM. And the system became once more so unresponsive that I had to literally reset it, after 5mins of nothing. I'd like to implement in my Ubuntu-based distro what they have in CachyOS. I'm not exactly sure, but I think it's a ZRAM-based swap partition? Something like 1 or 2GB commited to compressed virtual memory in RAM? Seems this works much better when things are close to getting dicey...how would I go about doing what they use in CachyOS? Is there any easy to follow guide?

So...yeah, I know about the ragebait. So...my gf is testing the waters with Linux, moving away from Mac. I have a cute Chuwi Minibook X laptop in which I installed KDE Neon for her, with a bit of a Mac theming. Could have chosen ElementaryOS, but ah well.

At any rate, her pain point is ADobe Acrobat, which she uses constantly to edit PDF files in all sort of ways, adding pictures, cutting/pasting parts on other PDFs, modifying paragraphs and changing the arrangements and so on... I'm having a bit of trouble making it run on Wine/Lutris/Bottles, and I'd like to know if there's any other alternative that could cover some PDF editing properly in Linux. Any suggestions?

Hi guys! I have a server on a rather reliable network, with 1Gbps connection upload verified by different connections over the same area. However, in some countries where the connection is very unreliable, the connection slowly dies, and stays dead halfway through the transfer. Is there any client which would be prepared to adapt or detect an unreliable connection, and retry/resume as soon as it happens without losing the transfer? I find filezilla sometimes tends to stall halfway through, and it stays...hung without doign much. And sometimes after restarting the connection, it just overwrites the file from the beginning without prompting. Is there a better system or client to transfer large files in a resumeable way over the internet?

Thanks!

So...with all this openclaw stuff, I was wondering, what's the FOSS status for something to run locally? Can I get my own locally run agent to which I can ask to perform simple tasks (go and find this, download that, summarize an article) or things like this? I'm just kinda curious about all of this.

Thanks!

WKUK - Iran

Hi guys! I'm considering some tool to edit the texts and images within a PDF. What would be some decent recommendations? So far I think the only with a semblance of working has been Libreoffice Draw, but it messed the formatting quite a lot (the arrangement is very much off in many pages, the text splits incorrectly, some images pop up duplicated and so on). But so far it's the only one I've seen actually allowing me to play with the PDF contents. Are there any other/better options?

Thanks!

So...I'm installing KDE for my gf. She needs to be able to use Acrobat Pro in order to edit PDFs which is something she commonly does. So...I managed to install it. In Lutris. It does open, and from the 'open file' menu, I can actually open PDFs to edit them.

However...when I click on a random PDF file on my desktop...it completely ignores it, and just open to the welcome screen. Is there a way I can pass the file URL to Lutris/Adobe?

For better details, let's see, the KDE shortcut looks as follows:

Name: Adobe Acrobat Generic Name: Comments: Environment Variables: LUTRIS_SKIP_INIT=1 Program: flatpak command-line arguments: run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/1

So...I tried to pass the %U at the end of the arguments, so it would look as:

run net.lutris.Lutris lutris:rungameid/1 %U

But this doesn't look too successful, as it seems to completely ignore the last part. So...how can I pass the file URL to flatpak Lutris/Adobe?

Hi guys! I have a rather beefy machine. AMD Ryzen 7700, 32GB DDR5, GPU 7800XT 16GB, several NVME drives for OS, general data, games. And yet...after a while it becomes completely unresponsive. Mouse freezes, keyboard doesn't key anything, and the screen gets completely frozen. Meanwhile the disk led gets full activity, almost constantly red. So...While this might be crazy pagination turning the system to a crawl (I have an 8GB swapfile), I want to be able to determine what's going on. Is there a way I can check any log, or enable any kind of logging that would tell me what happened on the seconds before it became completely unresponsive? Who takes all my memory??

Normal situations where this happens:

Firefox open, multiple windows, lots of tabs. Maybe ~5-8GB of RAM.

Virtmanager running a Windows VM, running a work remote desktop...4GB of RAM

Steam...1GB of RAM

Thunderbird, Deluge, Telegram, Whatsapp...Not much more really.

This shouldn't even come close to the RAM capacity of this machine. And yet...it really looks like it suffocates without memory. How can I check for issues?

Hi guys!

So...Yeah. I have your average Deluge/Sonarr/Radarr combo. What I'm finding increasingly annoying is, these days some release groups are putting their names more frequently BEFORE the filename. This makes it rather hard to find even the folders of the files being downloaded. Is there an easy way to address this? I'd like to keep the rest of the things in the filename there, and maybe even the release group name...but at the end of the file. The most important thing, the filename should come first. How to best do this?

Thanks!

Hi! So I have a backblaze account, and I would like to make a restic backup of my servers, but I'd like to be able to handle the paths, schedules and other options via GUI. What would be a good/easy GUI to set it up?

Thanks!

Hi guys! So...yeah. I have a Chuwi Minibook X N150 laptop that I'm testing around. Seems so far, so good regarding hardware support, with even the camera working on apps like the zoom flatpak. There's one thing that keeps irking me though, and that's the GRUB boot menu. It's all rotated to the left (90º counter-clockwise). This is probably because they're using some sort of tablet 1080p LCD screen. Once logged in, the acceleration sensors (took a couple of boots to get them working) take over, and determine what is up and down. At the SDDM login screen, I can handle it with a quick xrandr --output mydisplay --rotate right. But...GRUB? Seems grub ignores me.

I have tried by now things such as: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="video=efifb fbcon=rotate:3", or GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="i915.fastboot=1 fbcon=rotate:3" or even: GRUB_FB_ROTATION=270

But so far, nothing sticks, and the screen remains locked at a 90 degree angle. Any ideas of what could I do to sort it out?

I have KDE Neon installed, which is an Ubuntu 24.04 so far.

Thanks!

Hi guys! I'd like to consider a small portable camera to carry around whenever traveling, that takes about as little space and weight as possible. The idea is replacing the mobile phone on a stick, as a lot can go wrong when attempting a silly picture near a lake or waterfall (you get the idea).

So I guess no additional lenses or similar, just a portable camera that takes good pictures. As it might be also for my gf's use, one of the features I'd like it to have probably would be a reversible screen so it can be used to take selfies. And perhaps another one might be an optical zoom, but this might not be mandatory. I am lucky to be in a country where a lot of the models might be available, and even second hand, but I'd need some direction about what would be recommended.

Thanks!

Hi guys! How would you sync bookmarks across multiple devices? I have a secondary old phone for the only purpose of motorcycle navigation. Usually I'd make my edits on the normal daily driver and i just grab the one for navigation on the last minute. Any idea how to get the other phone to quickly sync all updated bookmarks etc?

So...As I installed KDE Neon recently, it worked and autosuspended perfectly after 15min, which is what's set on Power Management settings. However, I've noticed after installing and configuring all the rest of the apps, it's no longer the case. I mean, it DOES suspend if I manually click the Suspend in the start menu, or if I hit the suspend key from my keyboard. But it won't do it on its own.

I initially suspected SMPlayer, which in the Ubuntu 24.04 repos has a long standing issue about this (will suspend when playback stopped, but not when paused). But after installing the newest flatpak...and even with SMPlayer closed, it's still not suspending. What else could be blocking Power Management from suspending my PC? How can I troubleshoot this?

Thanks!

I mean, who thought of this as a good idea? I find it rather distracting. I'm trying to SSH into a computer and blam...a massive pop-up blocks me from reading what was before or anything else...just the pop-up in front, blocking text. It has the hidden password text field thing, but this one is to type yes/no to whether accept the server's cert. Y hit enter after typing yes...and blam, another pop-up, this one is for the actual password.

How can I disable these pop-up prompts? I want to be prompted as text, on the konsole main screen, as it always was. I haven't changed anything, because well, this is a brand new install. It started happening on a different computer and found it equally irritating.

Any idea how can I disable this? Thanks so much!

Hi guys!

I'm running currently the latest KDE Neon, and I'd like to install Sugar Candy for the SDDM login screen. So I just went to the 'get new themes' menu, clicked install...and I can see it added on my SDDM settings. I click apply, restart....and nope. I default to the most basic login screen, seemingly after something fails to correctly load. Is there any way I could troubleshoot this? Any idea why it failed? I always get a bit of trouble trying to get an SDDM theme working.

Hi guys! I am changing distro and am kinda settling on KDE-Neon (ubuntu based), as this was pretty reliable for me back in the day. So far it's been all great, but I'm wondering why Lutris (which came pre-configured and untouchable in a way in Nobara) won't detect additional proton installs. I'm using ProtonPlus with Lutris chosen, and I have installed for example Proton-EM. I can see ProtonPlus did download and add a folder on my user:

/home/my-user/.local/share/lutris/runners/proton/

However this doesn't seem to get Lutris to show it. I only get wine-ge-8.26, Proton-GE Latest and the system Wine. Why is Lutris not catching the Proton-EM? What should I do?

Thanks!

Hi guys!

I'm looking for a replacement travel dongle to play my Jellyfin movies whenever I'm traveling. My goto device up to this point has been a Chromecast (with GTV I think). But it's becoming increasingly clear its playback is very unreliable, hanging mid-playback for long periods. I blamed it initially on bandwidth issues over very long distances (the server is on a different continent at the moment!). But playing on the laptop via browser or via the jellyfin media player flatpak works just beautifully. So it clearly seems to be issues with the Chromecast as it's connected to the same Wifi and TV as the laptop.

So I am thinking...what other devices could I look into as Chromecast replacement? There's over 3yr old recommendations about a Walmart device (but I don't live anywhere near the American continent). The other go-to device would be an Nvidia Shield, the canister-looking one. But that still seems a bit hefty for traveling. After all these years, is there any device you'd recommend to use as light-to-bring dongle for traveling?

Thanks!