You’re off base with this. Almost unbelievably so.
They know they aren’t concerned with scams, why are you pretending? The move is to restrict competition and improve surveillance capacity as much as possible with as much legal protection as possible for Google. “Vulnerable people” don’t typically know how to use F-Droid, and scammers would take a week to find out am effective alternative even if this was somehow their main tactic; which it is not and they did fine before it was an option.
I own my phone. I get to pick what is installed on it. The fucking mandatory Google apps were already too far, this is straight up telegraphing intent to commodify as much of my life as they can get access to. Even beyond how fucking bad this is for the overall health of tech development and sovereignty, I dont want a company that is complicit with a fascist state to force me or anyone else who would challenge that state to register our fucking identities with them. For all I fucking know, they’d get me thrown into a camp as readily as they’d cut off my access to pirated media. You think it’s a coincidence they’re doing this shit at the same time liberals and fascists are desperately trying to seize some kind of control over the internet? It’s for grandma’s safety? The fuck it is.
Really good point to illustrate how liberal reform efforts just redirect capitalist control into an increasingly contrived legal system.