@neil Yes, quite. And that is what I thought your view would be.

@neil I should add: even having said all that, I can at least acknowledge that there is a case for IDs being checked before permitting apps to ship via their own store. I wish it wasn't the same company that's harvesting so much other personal data, but I do think it is preferable that apps are not published with no verified responsible person.

Once again, I'd be a lot more comfortable if identity verification could be done by a provider of my choice with only a token being passed to the store.

@neil During the last five years, I spent a fairly significant amount of time developing an android app. I got a developer account and had an alpha release on the play store.
Unfortunately, personal circumstances took my focus away from it for some time, and by the time I got back to it, my account had been deleted after I hadn't responded to one of their requests.

I found the sign up process unpleasant and intrusive, so the idea of going through it again is not appealing. Naturally, I thought about putting my app on another store. The idea of that company being in control of what I can provide to other people to run on their devices was enough to make me quit. I won't be releasing my work as long as this restriction is being held over us.

@bitchboss @knowmadd @MissGayle
Right. Of course, LLMs, lacking creative thinking, aren't able to come up with this by themselves.