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 5 days 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.