> developers will have the same freedom to distribute their apps directly to users
You have here Google making a statement it can't actually fulfill and one that it knows it can't fulfill. So Google is willfully lying here.
The minute Google has a technical capability to control what applications run on Android it's out of their hands. It is in the hands of courts, governments, dictators and authoritarians. That's just the nature of the world - Google has to obey the law and Google doesn't make the laws.
I guess it sounds hysterical, but in that sense, this is an absolutely massive loss of freedom for the entire planet as communication power that rested with individual choice is now transferred wholesale back to governments by this decision.
I guess words don't don't have meaning anymore, how can you claim to have an open system in an announcement about closing it down?
It's also telling that the big supporters of this are apparently corporations and governments. Admittedly I don't know what "Developer's Alliance" is but they don't seem to care about developers very much, and I wouldn't surprised if they were just a "pay us to say what you're doing is good for devs" kind of thing