It really seems like they are doing a lot to appease the tiny minority of us power users, adb load unaffected, one time toggle in settings to opt out, no change to alternative app stores as long as the apk was built by a verified developer. Crazy how harsh the sentiment is here, there are real people being harmed by scam apps intercepting sms one time codes and this will reduce the rate of that happening. It's not like we can't sideload anymore, though a lot of comments here seem to be implying otherwise.

Because this is a glide path to what they really want, look at Apple and running unsigned apps on your Mac, how it started, simple right click, how is it going, near impossible.

Because the initial announcement included none of that... it wasn't addressed at all until the harsh sentiment.

> intercepting sms one time codes

Crazy idea, maybe they shouldn't be using those then. Maybe they should use email? Or god forbid a TOTP app. Or perhaps webauthn via the platform provided authenticator.

They very clearly aren't behaving in good faith. That's why the harsh sentiment.

But that "tiny minority" are the people developing apps, which all their other users use... if you drive away devs from wanting to develop on your platform that's not going to go well for you (of course, they may still be forced to develop for Android if they want a wide audience, but you're driving away hobbyists with new ideas)

Those scam apps largely are installed from the Play store. Let them fix that first.