The ones that don’t sideloading obviously won’t care. But the ones that do are going to have little incentive to stick around if that was the main selling point for them, and the devs for non Google play apps leave because they don’t want to hand over info to Google.
At that point why not go to Apple if Android no longer delivers the type of sideloading experience they desire? Apple is more polished, has longer support, battery life, and peripherals.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 week ago
The type of people crying over this are not moving to iPhones lol. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. Google know it, which is why they know they can do this with no issue.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The people crying over this are the ones who care about sideloading. So if that aspect is gone then why stick with Android? It’s definitely not for Google play apps for me.
FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au 1 week ago
Side loading isn’t going away, just “anonymous” side loading. I suspect it will end up being a non-issue anyway, as simply registering as a developer through their portal so you can have your app be side loaded isn’t a big deal unless your app is doing something nefarious.
I’m not “defending” anything, let alone Google. All I’m doing is being realistic. The tiny minority of people this will affect have no alternative, and this change is likely to make very little actual change to those people anyway.
Lfrith@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Small minority of people who about this and end up affected will just leave for something else if custom ROMs stops being an option and dev scene dies out.
Not every Dev on F-Droid wants to hand over their info to Google.
You can argue that Google doesn’t care because they are a minority and custom ROM users provide no benefit to them, which is true. But to act like people are stuck with Google if the feature they care about affects apps that interest them are stuck with Google isn’t true either. They are already doing stuff that is unusual from regular users.