There needs to be a collection of devs supporting this, or promising to remove their apps from google play if this passes. I’d be one of them, but I don’t see any group / collection of devs doing this yet.
Unfortunately, I really can’t see a critical mass of devs organizing to do that. What I’d really like to see is for somebody to start selling hardware with something like GrapheneOS installed out of the box. Having to get an older phone, and then side load the OS is just too high a bar for even most technical people to jump over. But if you could just buy a phone that works out of the box, that could drive adoption. And then the ecosystem would develop around it completely outside Google control.
Either that, or for chinese android OEMs to just refuse this. I have a Xiaomi android tablet where google play is entirely optional, and it doesn’t require any developer verification, and I greatly doubt they’d let google refuse to let them use their own app stores.
I made an issue on the keepandroidopen repo about a "remove my app from google play pledge at least.
That’s a good point, I didn’t really consider Xiaomi being Android based. If Google did go through with this, they could do the same thing Huawei did too, and just fork. I really wish I could get Chinese phones in Canada, maybe now that the relations with the US are souring, there might be a possibility.
I do think everything comes down to the ecosystem in the end, and that’s what ends up being the lock in mechanism. If you live in a country using a western software stack, and you need to communicate with other people, it becomes really difficult using any platform that doesn’t support popular apps everybody uses.
One of the worst developments in the tech space was proprietary protocols becoming the norm with stuff like Slack WhatsApp, and Discord. Now huge chunks of the public are locked into that because all their friends are on those platforms.
