A theoretical way to circumvent Android developer verification

Desperation for what exactly? More control?

They are trying to stop crime, including sex/drug trafficking and child exploitation. If you want to have an intellectually honest debate, you need to be clear that private communication apps do make it more difficult for police to conduct legitimate investigations. You do yourself no favours painting all politicians as power-hungry caricatures.

So do private in person conversations. Going the route of North Korea putting two way speakers in each house would help make those conversations available to the government. Think of all of the child exploitation you could stop by removing any sense of privacy. Of course they would figure a way around this and everyday citizens would have to deal with the lack of privacy but at least they thought of the children so we should keep voting them in.

If chat control is a good-faith effort to stop crime, why can't Android developer verification be a good-faith effort to stop cybercrime?

If politicians are not all power-hungry caricatures, is it possible that the same is true for businesses?

Android has millions of users worldwide, many of whom are far less computer-literate than HN users. I think it's very reasonable for Google to put speed bumps in front of malware developers trying to distribute through the Play Store. If you're a half-decent dev, $25 is nothing compared to the opportunity cost of your time in developing your app.

This whole thing seems to be a fairly recent announcement on Google's part, so it's unsurprising they're still hammering out details for hobbyist devs? How about making constructive suggestions for ways that Google can protect ordinary people without stopping power users?

I think the issue is not about distribution in the Play Store (I don't actually have any problem with that: their playground, their rules) but the fact that they are going to break sideloading and alternative app sources like F-Droid.

I struggle to see any good-faith need to erect additional barriers to protect users from running the programs they want on devices they own, when you already have to be fairly expert to enable developer mode, install via adb, etc.

That's fair.