Google be Googlin'

This is one of those admittedly minor things that just reaffirm that while I tolerate Apple at best these days, good lord Google just makes me want to slam my head into a desk ad nauseam.

What happened? Well, I have a positively ancient Moto G3 that has a busted up display that's barely adhered on (not due to battery swelling, the screen was replaced and not put back on properly) and this phone is so ridiculously slow that it has only one purpose: To run DroidCam so that I can keep an eye on my 3D printers.

Now, I have a paid license for DroidCam, and I want to use it on this phone. This means I have to sign into my Google account on this phone. Doesn't seem so bad, right? Except some time ago, Google in their everlasting wisdom decided that every phone signed into your Google account WILL become an authenticator for any sign in attempts via a prompt. This is ironclad; if you have 2-factor authentication turned on and you have more than one device on your Google account, sign-in prompts will always be on. You cannot turn them off.

Previously upon signing in it would ask you if you wanted to use this phone as an authenticator and you could say no, I don't want to use this phone to approve sign ins.

Now, obviously, there's a huge security flaw in having an always on and unlocked phone acting as an IP camera that can authorize sign ins for your Google account. Would be trivial for someone to grab it and use it for Bad Things. The more pressing problem in my case is that on Android devices, the sign-in prompt takes over the entire phone. Any app that was running gets shoved into the foreground and the prompt must be answered. Even if you respond to it on another device.

(iOS, sadly, does the same thing. But there's a way around it. Kind of.)

As you can imagine, if you perch an Android phone up somewhere and have DroidCam running 24/7, you have to now take it down and dismiss that prompt for DroidCam to work again. Good stuff.

I mentioned iOS does this too, and it does. iOS, however, offers you an out: If you need to access a paid app in the App Store, you can just sign into the App Store/iTunes Store without signing into iCloud as a whole. That means I can dust off my old iPhone 6, just sign into the App Store, grab my paid up copy of DroidCam, and be done without binding the phone to my account.

Google in their all knowing wisdom will not allow this. If you want to even do so much as touch your Google account you have to fully commit to it and give everything access to it.

As is typical with situations like this, the solution was obvious albeit difficult: Just sign out everything on the Moto G3, sail the high seas for a patched APK, and use Android Debug Bridge to install it over USB. (And yes, I did make sure to vet the APK before installing it to make sure it wasn't something nasty.)

Bam, no more license checks, app will work fine without an account signed in, no more worrying if a prompt is going to knock it offline again. (And before you go "OMGZ PIRACY", settle down. I've paid for the app twice over at this point.)

What I wouldn't give for Google to do like Apple and just let us sign into individual apps rather than committing our whole accounts like this. Even Microsoft does this right with Windows, you can just sign into the Store without letting Windows as a whole get taken over by your account.

But nah. Google's gonna Google, I guess.