Thank you so much for clarifying! That is most definitely not as bad as I had feared.

I still feel, though, that having to go ahead and proclaim “I am a developer!” just to enable sideloading is a bit much, as almost certainly the vast majority of sideloaders aren’t developers. Nonetheless, it does keep sideloading as an option, and I do see why, from Google’s perspective, using the already-existing developer mode to gate the feature would be convenient in the short term. Perhaps the announcement should specify this -- I suspect a number of people who read it also noticed the lack of that clarification.

And yes, good point on ADB. That does make this less inconvenient for developers or power users, though doesn’t help non-developers very much.