Yes, it's a very unfriendly decision by Google.
However, I don't think they haven't measured the number of users installing apps outside of the Play store. May be they just don't care about the small % of total users who are a large % here on HN.
This is a part of a bigger trend, Cory Doctorow spoke about 13 years ago in his "The coming war on general computing": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
And this will creep out to the major desktop systems too, Apple is doing it with their stupid "non-verified app" and Windows looks more likely to do so with their "need Microsoft account to login" to windows.
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