I have the same mentality as you. But, rather than form an opinion on whatever EU regulation is being interpreted as "requiring" these steps from Google et al, I think I'm going to assert that it's a red herring.

The real issue, IMO, is that it's still too hard to distribute and install applications on my general-purpose computing devices! You can't be on Google's app store if you aren't a "real business" with a physical address and everything? Fine. Let's just distribute our apps on F-Droid, or by just releasing APKs in our GitHub pages, etc.

At least that's still possible with Android. But who knows how much longer they'll even allow that?

Yeah, if you have a market that can be installed by the user without passing through a marketplace. The EU regulation gets blamed, but that's not the actual issue.

I think the issue may be thinking of your phone, running a non-open OS, as a general-purpose computing device.

Presumably F-Droid is subject to the same regulatory requirements, so in this case it is directly the regulation to blame.

F-Droid isn’t in the same business, and doesn’t sell apps, so it’s not subject to the same regulatory requirements.

F-Droid has apps with the "ads" anti-feature, so this probably applies to them.

I think it’d apply to the app owner. F-Droid isn’t in the advertising business either, doesn’t get any revenue.

That feature flag just changes what is allowed to appear in search results.

The DSA applies to

> all online intermediaries and platforms operating within the EU

From what I can tell, this all should apply only to monetized apps (and I agree with that). If that's not actually the case, Google is using malicious compliance to misguide developers into hating the EU for daring to regulate them.

That's probably where F-Droid is a better choice in the first place ?

Google Play (and the App store) assume by default commercial intent, and I'm sympathetic to stricter verification rules when there's money changing hands.

> I don't really want to put my name and address up on apps I throw up on the store

As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong, call them out publicly, or at least avoid their products. In no way is it reasonable that someone should want to stay anonymous while selling me something (or profiting off of it in one way or another). I really don't see a reason to make an exception for people who have free+offline+etc apps.

You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.

> You're publishing software, you need to be identifiable.

"Because I want to be able to sue you" is not a particularly compelling line of reasoning for legislating incredibly invasive laws.

This punishes the people who release apps for free or open source. For the money generating app farms it doesn't slow them down at all.

> As a customer I really want the ability to sue someone who does me wrong,

John Doe ?

It is always true that people love regulation until it ends up affecting them negatively, through the magic of unintended consequences and emergent phenomenon in complex systems like human societies and economies.