Wow that’s pretty extreme for android honestly.

I think they’re trying to make the play store genuine competition to the iOS ecosystem. It’s laughably easy to pirate APK’s which I would imagine would turn off a lot of developers, especially smaller ones that might just be one or two people.

That said, I’m sideloading on iOS latest firmware but it’s not as easy as googling the name of the app and putting IPA in the search thread.