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From F-Droid to emulators, here's who's hit hardest by Android's new verification rules
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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My suspicion is that it's because the playstore has become so awful that google is seeing the effect in their earnings. If customers get burned one too many times on a crappy app with fake reviews, then they're not going to spend any money on anything else in the store anymore. So now Google tries to sabotage the possible alternatives, rather than try to fix their product.
Playstore got so unbelievably bad now, and it happened so quickly, I feel like I'm going insane. Who's decision was to do it like that and was there even a person to make decisions!
I have actually bought an app on the play store once, because I had a gift card. Turns out, they didn't use the gift card and used my cc on file for Google drive. Had to spend hours sorting that out with automated customer service, never gonna use that again. Their product actually does suck, and a lot of the reason that f-droid doesn't is that they aren't charging you to use it.