This is a creative way to construct a walled garden. Technically you’re allowing sideloading, but you discourage users from wanting to do this because many apps are not compatible with sideloading by promoting a feature that breaks the capability to do so.
It’s another way to force people into your ecosystem and prevent competition with an argument in hand as to why you’re not directly responsible for the effect. Clearly, monopolistic behavior.
It also seems like a really dumb strategy because do you really want to become a worse iOS? If you just decide that’s what you want, now you’re competing with Apple on their own playing field and there you will lose.
Yaay now Google is trying to copy IOS little by little with their lame “security restrictions”. I just hope that 1 day we will actually be able to have a device running just plain old Linux. (I know Android is based on Linux) I said plain old Linux.
If an Android program¹ is available elsewhere DRM free, open source, FOSS, etc., go for that instead, even before confirming the presence of this new DRM / social engineering tool in the given program. And if the program itself is not available, look for alternatives. And to make researches a little easier, some APK resources from the top of my head besides F-Droid and Github are Humble Bundle, Itchio, Patreon and potentially any Github alternative.
¹ “app” should never have replaced the name already adopted for no good reason
I wonder if the play integrity fix can also handle this? I have it for my rooted phone to keep my banking apps working. I sure hope so!