Alright I look it up. The latest situation is EU and Japan force Apple to allow "alternative app marketplaces". So it is great if you live there. For others, there isn't any clean way to do so. All those solutions are hacks and tricks, with their own quirks and limits.

Apple doesn't allow sideloading in iOS. Google is adding restrictions to "unverified" sideloading too. https://developers.slashdot.or...

And then you face a lot of banking and/or government stuff that support iOS/Android only. Some guard against rooting or jailbreaking. Some even guard against 3rd party app stores and sideloading.

Using an "app" instead of SMS for 2-factor authentication is legit. But when that "app" dictates what phone you can buy, the situation changes. Ideally, banks and government shall either be regulated to be friendly to smartphone competitors outside Android-iOS duopoly, or Android and iOS be regulated to allow unconstrained sideloading unless an app is known to be malware. In reality, both sides are cooperating together and tighten their grip to commoners.

The issue is as of 2026, too many things are iOS+Android only. This duopoly means that if they decide to ban an app together, your software will be banned from the "smartphone" ecosystem. This is not the case of a normal "brick and mortar store". A normal "brick and mortar store" isn't capable of banning a good from sales worldwide.

To get the old system information corpus, press the "copy" button and paste it into a text editor or anywhere that can type text.

You mean https://github.com/orgs/linuxm... ?

Fortunately Clement Lefebvre didn't go full blown the GNOME style anti-user attitude, and recognized the issue is valid at the end. A damage control from JosephMcc calling it "isn't a bug" and "no plans to change it" in https://github.com/linuxmint/c...

In my proposed system, there is never a record of who bought which age verification card. Only a promise from shops that the cards are always sold to adults, not children. Where is the "they already have your data" come from?

Our society is never capable of stopping an adult buying cigarette then hand off them to underage.

Stop support Nanny State. The exploit you mentioned is a necessary compromise to protect freedom of speech. If banning social platform or restricting social platform feature from underage is *solely* for protecting children, we shouldn't need to care "could we trace which adult break the verification system and let a child watch porn or read/write foul languages". It isn't a crime big enough to worth the time and cost of arrest + prosecution.

When we worry about the loss of anonymity and privacy in online social life, anonymity and privacy form greedy corporations is just a small part of it. The bigger part is anonymity and privacy from authoritarian and totalitarian government.

"Digital ID card" is dangerous by itself, especially if you mean what the UK government tried to mandate.

No, a proper age verification system for online platform shall let no one, not even the government has your actual data.

Print age verification cards similar to how companies print Apple app store gift cards or Google play gift cards. Request cashiers to check one's age upon purchase of these age verification cards. Check one's age in a face to face manner, perhaps some additional eyeball checking of one's ID card. No physical nor digital record of who bought the card will be created, similar to how no reliable record of who bought those Apple / Google gift cards is produced by the convenient store.

I am more willing to give up anonymity for some service than others. If it is personal communication via the phone (e.g. Whatsapp), all authorities know who is using the phone anyway, so the phone number attachment to an app on the phone is more acceptable to me.

But for pure internet social platform, sorry. We don't need permanent record for people who buy beer or porn in a physical shop. Same for online activities. Those people who claim they want to "protect children" can create an anonymous age certificate gift card system, then sell these cards in physical shops. Let cashiers verify the age of the buyers face to face. No record is going to leave behind who have bought which card.

In theory you can host your own Flathub alternative, for software that Flathub rejects, but not for Snap. So Flatpak is more distro-neutral then Snap.

But yeah, any suggestion that Flatpak is "distro lock-in" is plainly wrong.

Women can come back to their job after they get their babies born. This is a fact. And if the boss fires a woman for her pregnancy, the company will be sued for discrimination.

Education system shaming teenage mothers out of education path and/or the lack of assistance of them getting back into education path after childbearing is a systemic discrimination.

In baby boomer era, it was okay or even expected to leave school and get into job market by the age of around 15. "Teenage pregnancy" or "student pregnancy" was a non-issue.

A job working adult can continue their career after pregnancy. Why college is an exception? It is not teenage pregnancy the wrong. It is the education system that discriminate teenage pregnancy the wrong here. Back then average school life ended earlier, thus the conflict was less obvious.

So far, all the age verification tools in use create juicy databases of online-offline identity matching. Such databases are dangerous. They let criminals exploit and hurt people. They let totalitarian governments monitor and threaten anyone who dare expose their crimes.

All these politicians in support of such online age verification are either totalitarians themselves or useful idiots / puppets of those totalitarians.