When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.
Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.
News? Pegged.
The latest broadside fired in the war against platform freedom has been fired. Google recently announced new upcoming restrictions on APK installations. Starting in 2026, Google will tightening the screws on sideloading, making it increasingly difficult to install applications that haven’t been blessed by the Play Store’s approval process. It’s being sold as a security measure, but it will make it far more difficult for users to run apps outside the official ecosystem. There is a security argument to be made, of course, because suspect code can cause all kinds of havoc on a device loaded with a user’s personal data. At the same time, security concerns have a funny way of aligning perfectly with ulterior corporate motives.
It’s a change in tack for Google, which has always had the more permissive approach to its smartphone platform. Contrast it to Apple, which has sold the iPhone as a fully locked-down device since day one. The former company said that if you own your phone, you could do what you want with it. Now, it seems Google is changing its mind ever so slightly about that. There will still be workarounds, like signing up as an Android developer and giving all your personal ID to Google, but it’s a loss to freedom whichever way you look at it.
Beginnings
The walled garden concept didn’t start with smartphones. Indeed, video game consoles were a bit of a trailblazer in this space, with manufacturers taking this approach decades ago. The moment gaming became genuinely profitable, console manufacturers realized they could control their entire ecosystem. Proprietary formats, region systems, and lockout chips were all valid ways to ensure companies could levy hefty licensing fees from developers. They locked down their hardware tighter than a bank vault, and they did it for one simple reason—money. As long as the manufacturer could ensure the console wouldn’t run unapproved games, developers would have to give them a kickback for every unit sold.
By and large, the market accepted this. Consoles were single-purpose entertainment machines. Nobody expected to run their own software on a Nintendo, after all. The deal was simple—you bought a console from whichever company, and it would only play whatever they said was okay. The vast majority of consumers didn’t care about the specifics. As long as the console in question had a decent library, few would complain.
There was always an underground—adapters to work around region locks, and bootleg games that relied on various hacks—with varying popularity over the years. Often, it was high prices that drove this innovation—think of the many PlayStation mod chips sold to play games off burnt CDs to avoid paying retail.
At the time, this approach largely stayed within the console gaming world. It didn’t spread to actual computers because computers were tools. You didn’t buy a PC to consume content someone else curated for you. You bought it to do whatever you wanted—write a novel, make a spreadsheet, play games, create music, or waste time on weird hobby projects. The openness wasn’t a bug, or even something anybody really thought about. It was just how computers were. It wasn’t just a PC thing, either—every computer on the market let you run what you wanted! It wasn’t just desktops and laptops, either; the nascent tablets and PDAs of the 1990s operated in just the same way.
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