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I feel like there's a big thing being missed in all of this, which is that F-Droid lives. I scrolled through hundreds of comments so far and not seen anyone make this observation.

Do I love it? Absolutely not. But F-Droid was facing an existential threat from the early early versions of the proposal and now will continue to live. Again, I don't love it but this is a huge change to the fate of F-Droid.

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Well, Google is keeping the fees and the ID requirements for devs, while also vastly shrinking the population that will be willing to get permission to sideload from Google, decimating much of F-Droid's reach. They are basically attacking freedom on both sides, clamping down and extracting on the supply side, and creating friction and confusion on the demand side.

I'm extremely worried for the future of open source on mobile operating systems. We traded freedom for convenience.

TBH it is a little surprising, because one option available to Google was staying the course and hiding behind their Epic court loss.

"Everyone can still access F-Droid, it just has to live in the Play Store. We're bound by law to support alternative app stores now anyways. Everyone wins!"

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