Who knows. Maybe they have that one dev on the app team that’s on a crusade to detect every single abnormality.

He might also be following the rooting/magisk scene. Back then whenever magisk updates its root hiding system and successfully bypasses apps, mcdonalds are the first to detect it again. He’s so fast that back when I was still using a rooted phone, I’ve never successfully bought a meal with the app.

Now they’re blocking work profiles on non-rooted phones, which is a native android feature and not a security risk. But they’re still blocking it anyway because it’s slightly abnormal lol.

CM5s have 16GB of ram, some people might be building a postmarket os port for it too. Just need someone to design phone hardware for it.

The biggest problem are the banking apps. If you’re standing at checkout and your payment app says

“Unverified apps have been detected on your phone. Please uninstall and try again.”

99% of people will delete FDroid and never sideload anything ever again.

They’ll probably also release a new API to allow apps to check if user have enabled sideloading. Then overzealous apps like fucking mcdonalds will throw a hissy fit about it and refuse to work unless you turn it off. Also your bank too, just to really make it as hard as possible to include sideloaded apps. Sideloading will remain available, but so painful, most people just give up.

Just recently mcdonalds app stopped working when installed in a secondary profile. Long history of them trying to detect root hiding methods too. Fuck them. Once this sideload block thing arrives, mcdonalds would be the first to block it.