While i always try to look for open source utility apps (i use several), our userbase simply don't care.

Context: Our apps are means to connect to our devices via BLE, are free and without ads (fuck ads, fuck all ads), no integrity checks. We don't publish the API but we know of a couple of clients that reverse engineered the protocol and made their own. Good for them. (one of them also came by the office to bring a friend and showed us his app that glued together the functionality of several modules from also our competitors. Cool!)

But given what we do our customers are complete normies, doing what google asks us is the path of least resistance, and gets us most audience.

Those who don't want to use the play store can find the APK in the usual sites, don't care.

If i made app for myself i would indeed distribute it differently.