Join us for Capital Bike's Annual December Lights Ride on December 14, 2025 at 4:00 PM, a festive and family friendly guided ride! We'll start at Oaklands Elementary School (Meet at the Basketball courts) and pedal through mostly quiet streets, visiting the neighborhood's best holiday light displays. Make sure to decorate your bikes with festive gear and lights, dress warmly, and bring plenty of cheer! We'll kick off with a cozy hot chocolate celebration (pre-ride). Register for free to let us know you're coming! Arrival & Hot Chocolate Celebration: 4:00pm-4:30pm Mandatory Safety Discussion: 4:30pm (Ride starts immediately after)! What to expect: Holiday cheers, festive lights, following the rules of the road, ride marshals, approx. 1 hour route of riding, lots of fun! A reminder that there will be no washrooms on site or on route. Safety Rules: Please ride in single file, cross when safe to do so, and follow your marshal's instructions and most importantly, follow the rules of the road. Remember it is dark out, so please ensure cars can see you before crossing or turning. By registering for this event you are agreeing to the Disclaimer at the bottom of the page. While Registration for this family friendly festive event is free, we greatly appreciate all donations so we can host more cycling celebrations! Please feel welcome to visit our Donations page if you would like to support festive events like this one! Donate here Thank you to our Hot Chocolate Sponsor, Tim Hortons @ Hillside Mall! By registering for this event you are agreeing to the Disclaimer below. See you there!

_Posted by Matthew Forsythe Director - Product Management, Android App Safety_ We recently announced new developer verification requirements, which serve as an additional layer of defense in our ongoing effort to keep Android users safe. We know that security works best when it accounts for the diverse ways people use our tools. This is why we announced this change early: to gather input and ensure our solutions are balanced. We appreciate the community's engagement and have heard the early feedback – specifically from students and hobbyists who need an accessible path to learn, and from power users who are more comfortable with security risks. We are making changes to address the needs of both groups. To understand how these updates fit into our broader mission, it is important to first look at the specific threats we are tackling. Why verification is important Keeping users safe on Android is our top priority. Combating scams and digital fraud is not new for us — it has been a central focus of our work for years. From Scam Detection in Google Messages to Google Play Protect and real-time alerts for scam calls, we have consistently acted to keep our ecosystem safe. However, online scams and malware campaigns are becoming more aggressive. At the global scale of Android, this translates to real harm for people around the world – especially in rapidly digitizing regions where many are coming online for the first time. Technical safeguards are critical, but they cannot solve for every scenario where a user is manipulated. Scammers use high-pressure social engineering tactics to trick users into bypassing the very warnings designed to protect them. For example, a common attack we track in Southeast Asia illustrates this threat clearly. A scammer calls a victim claiming their bank account is compromised and uses fear and urgency to direct them to sideload a "verification app" to secure their funds, often coaching them to ignore standard security warnings. Once installed, this app — actually malware — intercepts the victim's notifications. When the user logs into their real banking app, the malware captures their two-factor authentication codes, giving the scammer everything they need to drain the account. While we have advanced safeguards and protections to detect and take down bad apps, without verification, bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly. It becomes an endless game of whack-a-mole. Verification changes the math by forcing them to use a real identity to distribute malware, making attacks significantly harder and more costly to scale. We have already seen how effective this is on Google Play, and we are now applying those lessons to the broader Android ecosystem to ensure there is a real, accountable identity behind the software you install. Supporting students and hobbyists We heard from developers who were concerned about the barrier to entry when building apps intended only for a small group, like family or friends. We are using your input to shape a dedicated account type for students and hobbyists. This will allow you to distribute your creations to a limited number of devices without going through the full verification requirements. Empowering experienced users While security is crucial, we’ve also heard from developers and power users who have a higher risk tolerance and want the ability to download unverified apps. Based on this feedback and our ongoing conversations with the community, we are building a new advanced flow that allows experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified. We are designing this flow specifically to resist coercion, ensuring that users aren't tricked into bypassing these safety checks while under pressure from a scammer. It will also include clear warnings to ensure users fully understand the risks involved, but ultimately, it puts the choice in their hands. We are gathering early feedback on the design of this feature now and will share more details in the coming months. Getting started with early access We’re excited to start inviting developers to the early access for developer verification in Android Developer Console for developers that distribute exclusively outside of Play, and will share invites to the Play Console experience soon for Play developers. We are looking forward to your questions and feedback on streamlining the experience for all developers. Watch our video below for a walkthrough of the new Android Developer Console experience and see our guides for more details and FAQs. We are committed to working with you to keep the ecosystem safe while getting this right.