Comment by rcxdude
1 day ago
You are thinking about it from the point of view of an enthusiast/hacker who wants to put their homebrew stuff on it. But this is also tightening around developers who may want to distribute their applications to lay users.
Lay users use Play Store.
Users who use F-Droid are already not as lay. If you distribute stuff that Play Store would ban, your users are likely not as lay, too.
Yes, it's inconvenient, but I see it as a good-faith attempt to limit exposure of lay users to scams, not some power grab.
Those developers will pay $25 for identity verification and have no issues.
Unless they do something google doesn't like, or trip one of their many automated systems that ban them without recourse. Or they are compelled to revoke a key by a government.
Revocations are for apps being malware and nothing else, much like macOS Gatekeeper (Apple doesn't even revoke certs used by Warez groups to sign cracked apps).
Automated bans can be an issue, but that's an edge case. Google already had the functionality to 'revoke' an app if ordered to do so by a legal authority.
It is much more important to make a real world attack - something that is draining wallets of ordinary people across Thailand/Brazil/SEA in general - harder to achieve. One thing is a political goal of some people in the west, the other is an ordinary person not having the money to feed themselves because a scammer stole it all.
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Drivers license leaks are surging.
Google's identity verification system relies on multiple factors, not solely drivers licensees or other national identity documents.
There are exactly two groups of people who sideload APKs:
* people who know what they're doing
* people who are being victimized