This is the best possible outcome for Google: providing alternative application stores through the Play Store. So any application, including alternative application stores, are subject to universal app verification rules: allowing it to fully kill “sideloading” (as in: installing an APK from the web); while technically providing alternatives, gatekept by Google. The latter will likely just result in Play Store mirrors, that hardly provide any real competitive advantage over upstream. A purely symbolic, absolute joke of a court case.

OP seems to be same person as the OP of the Mastodon post. I think it would a lot more clear to copy the content of the Mastodon post over to this Lemmy post, and have a link directly to the FSF article.

Wouldn’t it be more useful to link to: https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2026/summer/ensuring-freedom-one-blob-at-a-time? Interesting project though.