And you really think Google are the pinnacle of honesty and you can take their word for everything?

They tried to block side loading, then relented after enormous pressure, and now are using corporate spin to make it sound like they care.

It doesn’t sound like that website’s up to date.

That site is absolutely up to date.

Google absolutely aren’t trying to make money from developer registrations, that’s just removing administrative burden.

They’re trying to make money from closing the platform. Google have been gradually working over the last few years to close Android, and this is just another step. It definitely won’t be the last. They have made it much more difficult to get up to date source of AOSP security fixes. Commit history is squashed. Play Integrity API changes are a ruse to secure the platform, that just happens to lock apps out of GrapheneOS, the most secure Android variant.

Google realise that there is a real threat from an open Android platforms giving users a choice and that will eat their profit margins.

F-Droid and Obtanium are going away for normal android users.

It is deliberately difficult, and this whole thing is absolutely about Google making more money by tightening control of the ecosystem, not about security.

A nice summary from https://keepandroidopen.org/

Nine steps, 24-hour wait, buried in Developer Options, delivered through a proprietary service that Google can revoke whenever they want. That’s not sideloading. That’s a deterrence mechanism built to ensure almost nobody completes it. And since it runs through Play Services rather than the OS, Google can tighten or kill it silently