Comment by rcxdude

I wouldn't be surprised if the people at google implementing this genuinely believe this to be the case. It was the same thing with AMP, the people doing it really seemed to believe it was entirely a good thing and there were no negative consequences whatsoever. But it doesn't really matter when the thing also blatantly concentrates power within themselves that can later be used to their own interests.

(Here's another reason it's a bad idea: scammers tend to be very good at navigating the roadblocks you put in to do a thing, often moreso than the people who legitimately want to do the thing, so I wouldn't be surprised if the scammers still have a healthy supply of malicious apps now signed by google. If they can't keep malware off of the play store where they see the malicious code, why do they think they can stop scammers registering as developers to sign their malware?)