Enforcement on 30 September hits seven stores in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Not sideloading, not other stores. But registration is bound to your app signing key, and Google's FAQ says a lost one can't be recovered.
There's a version of this story going around that says Android is closing. Sideloading is dead, the open platform is over, verify or disappear. I went and read Google's own developer verification pages this week, because Murror ships on Android and I wanted to know what I actually had to do before the end of the month. The docs say something narrower than the panic, and in one specific place something worse.
Start with what happens on 30 September.
Enforcement begins for users installing from participating stores Google Play, HONOR App Market, OPPO App Market, Galaxy Store, Palm Store, V-Appstore and GetApps in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, on certified devices running Android 7 or higher. If you haven't verified your identity and registered your apps by then, they're blocked from installation for users in those regions.
Frontier models now cluster above 90% on the public benchmarks, and Gartner says over 40% of agentic projects get killed by 2027. Those two facts are closer to the same fact than they look here's the eval that actually predicts whether your thing ships.
There's a number that decided which model your product runs on. You saw it on a leaderboard or in a launch post 94% on this, state-of-the-art on that and it did its job: it made you feel safe picking. I've done exactly this. That number is close to useless for the thing you actually care about, and this year it got worse, not better.
Most product teams track acquisition, activation, retention. The usual funnel. We track all of that at Murror too.
But there's one metric we started paying attention to that changed how we think about growth entirely: how often users talk about themselves differently after using the product.
Scroll the leaderboard right now and you can predict the next launch before you see it. It's an AI coworker. It lives in your Slack. It answers for you, drafts for you, books for you, follows up for you. The pitch is always the same: do more, automatically, so you don't have to.
I've been building long enough to feel the pull of that pitch. "Indispensable" is a comforting word. It sounds like a moat. It fundraises well.
Models shipped million-token windows this year. Then the research showed they quietly get worse the more you feed them and that flips how you build.
There's a move almost every maker makes the first time they build something on top of an AI model, and I made it too. The window is huge now, so you fill it. All the docs. The whole conversation history. Every tool you might conceivably need. The reasoning goes: the model is smart, more information can only help it, so give it everything and let it sort things out.
Last quarter, our team spent three weeks building a feature that does... nothing.
When a user writes something deeply painful in their journal grief, heartbreak, feeling lost Murror's AI used to respond immediately. Empathetic words, gentle reflections, suggested reframes. Users loved it in surveys. Our response quality scores were excellent.
When we first built Murror's reflection AI, we optimized for insight. Every journal entry got a thoughtful, confident analysis. Pattern recognition, emotional connections, suggestions for growth.
Something strange happened last week while working on a side project we've been building alongside Murror.
I described what I wanted a feature to do not how, just what. The AI built it. I tested it. It worked. Not just "worked" it handled edge cases I hadn't even thought of.
Happy New Year, everyone. How did you spend the first day of 2026?
For me, the first day of a new year feels like the opening step of a long journey. So instead of rushing into productivity, I chose to begin 2026 by taking care of both my body and my inner world.
Here s how my Day One looked:
An early morning run, pushed myself 1km further to reach 7km Wrote down all my goals for the year, both personal and professional Repotted my flowering plant into a new pot Cooked a nutritious meal for myself with Stranger Things series Started reading a new book Cleaned and reset my living space
