For an average Joe and Jane, who gets their money stolen, that's a good move. They don't care about technology, they just want their bank, instagram, cat pictures and video calls to work and not get scammed. They are often lured into installing scamware through exactly sideloading APK, completely unaware of the risks.
In the article there's this comment:
> I'm struggling to see the benefit of this new policy. While it's presented as a security measure, the requirement to fill out these forms seems like a trivial barrier for actual malware creators, who will easily abuse the system.
Every scammer will have a different code signing certificate which you can then block if they spread malware. Right now it's a huge mass of scammers and malware authors indistinguishable from each other. And Google could possibly block them all which would also block legitimate applications (now that would spark outrage). Thanks to the new policy it'll be easy to add a single cert to the blocklist.
If you want absolute freedom on your device, just install a different Android - for example Graphene, Lineage, /e/OS, or Calix. They are all Android too.
It's so fashionable these days to go after Google.
Thanks Google.
We could also teach basic computer literacy in schools so people could understand common scams. We could sell phones with "extra protections" that people with less knowledge could buy.
The only reason to force this crap on everyone is control. What google cares about is getting rid of people's ability to block ads, kill youtube vanced, and so on.
Google will implement this, the consumers will pay for it, scams will still exist, and Google will open their hands and say "welp we tried". The infrastructure will already be in place, and it will never be revoked.