And so the barriers for entry edge higher against small indy devs.

This seems extreme for the long tail of hobbyist apps. Finding 20 testers seems like a huge commitment for an unproven app, and I'm sure it would be a hurdle many apps currently in Google Play would not have gotten across if it existed then.

I wonder if this is a deliberate attempt to shut out hobby apps from their app store for whatever reason, rather than a good faith attempt to improve app quality.

In parallel they are also forcing people to publicly attach their real name to apps (people have long had to tell Google who they are to get in the app store, but not to make it public) - which might be another thing that is no big deal for big companies, but many smaller hobbyist app devs might think twice about doxxing themselves given how hostile people are on the Internet these days and how many crazies there are out there.

I get the intention behind the idea but the implementation seems strange. How are such developers going to find those testers? How will it improve anything regarding current state of apps in the store? What are criterias for those testers except for the fact that they exist?

Play Store needs better manual review from Google rather than such strange ideas. We've literally managed to push an app once which was broken after user authorization, and it passed the review process just fine. AppStore on the other hand kicked the build back at us the same day if not even faster than Google's response which sometimes takes a week or two.

Additionally, Play Store is filled with apps that are an obvious scam, impersonation or outright ad-hell with semi-broken functionality.

My point is: we need proper moderation of existing stuff first, and this has to be Google's job (wtf are we, as developers, pay revenue share to them?).

Well like those click farms needed more work anyway

Wow, as a small App developer this seems like a really unnecessary and arbitrary roadblock! I personally am 100% cool with smaller Apps having bugs and whatnot - it happens! As long as no sensitive information is involved.

Also from my experience (this could be down to my specific App though) most issues after publishing came up with phones running a specific vendor Android skins that behave differently than stock, something thats on Google to fix or prevent!

All the more reason to skip the Play store and deploy to F-Droid instead