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They will restrict this again in the future.

Or they could restrict F-Droid and mandate Play store in future releases of Android. "Security" would be a good candidate for justification.

Corporate greed has no limit.

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They won't directly "mandate" the use of Playstore since it would be an obvious abuse of monopoly to regulators. Instead they can (and do) allow developpers to enable various checks with the Play Integrity API to ensure the app comes from playstore and is running on an "unmodified" android aka maintream OEM android and not custom ROM.

They won't directly "mandate" the use of Playstore since it would be an obvious abuse of monopoly to regulators.

Unlike what they did to NextCloud? Unlike what Apple does?

They didn't force Nextcloud to distribute through PlayStore, and Apple is under scrutiny for malicious compliance on allowing third party stores in Europe

I'm pretty sure EU would love to hammer them with fines for that.

Unless they ban F-Droid in the US but not in the EU - similar things have happened in the past, but nothing of this scale yet.

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