Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

For the benefit of those reacting based on the headline and one-sentence summary, yes it's a pain, I agree with the mob that it should be the user's choice what they install, BUT, the headline is badly written, in that it implies that the app itself has to be verified, and also many commenters seem to have also inferred that it means an Apple walled-garden style Play Store lock-in which also isn't the case. (a better headline might have been "sideloading of Android apps from unverified publishers")

You can still publish and run apps from outside of the Play Store, but publishers will need to get a verified key from Google to sign them with. Google don't have any visibility of what the app actually is, they just issue you a key and you do whatever you want with it.

(EDIT: fuck me, don't shoot the messenger, just because you don't like what Google is doing. I even opened by saying I agreed that the user should be able to choose, knowing full well that the sort of person who doesn't read past the headline also would interpret correcting it as a defense of Google... guess I'd have been better off just quietly leaving y'all to get angry over things that didn't actually happen)