Go to the Android developer verification site and fill out the Google Form in the bottom of the page on the right under Share your feedback.

Give any employees inside google that agree with you the materials they need to show management it's unpopular even with developers, (even if you aren't actually one) and give Google's shareholders concern that this isn't just media speculation, it's real people with real concerns.

It's the year of the linux phone

The answer is likely a de-googled phone. We have some aftermarket variants of Android available. Though installing a new operating system on a phone isn't very mainstream. And skipping the Play services comes with consequences. Push notifications sometimes won't work, some apps outright refuse to work, and things like contactless payment are impossible. I've lived without Play services for a few years. Now I have them sandboxed in GrapheneOS. I wonder what they're going to do to address this.

The solution is what it has always been.

Since DAY ONE phone hardware should have been as standardized and open as normal PC hardware - able to run any operating system that you want.

But every time it got brought up for DECADES, techbro corporate apologists were ready to line up and talk about all the reasons that wouldn't work and how companies would NEVER do that, as if that was some kind of sensible counterpoint.

Now the noose is closing and all it's going to take is the combined forces of the richest companies in the world to crush what little competition remains. Undercut or sue Fairphone into oblivion, for example. The lawsuits don't even have to have merit - they can eat the costs for a few quarters to ensure no viable alternative to the walled garden ever gets a foothold.

The thing to be done now is minimize your mobile usage altogether and try to make it to the tech dystopian endgame with a few local files of your own left.

Honestly, given the ID requirements this feels like more efforts to track everything everyone does. It means any app with sufficient user base is trackable back to a real person. A real person they can arrest, bully or otherwise deal with if they don't like what they've built.

If you are an EU citizen then you need report this to the consumer protection services.

Here are some links I have found. There might be better ways to contact them but this is what I got for now. Feel free to correct me or add more ways to make our voices heard.

https://commission.europa.eu/

https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/selling-in-eu/competition-between-businesses/anti-competitive-behaviour/

If you are unsure about the problem, you can contact the European Commission at: comp-market-information@ec.europa.eu or write to:

European Commission, Directorate General for Competition Antitrust Registry B-1049 Brussels, Belgium

We need reboot of N900. Although it lost support long time ago as it was launched in 2009, you can still install latest PostmarketOS onto it: https://postmarketos.org/install/

A commercial Linux phone with backing from some larger company could succeed.

LineageOS? Aosp is still under Google control, so maybe not.

Fork Android?

For years Android people were yapping about how it’s open source, open platform and the competitors are not. So why not just fork it and keep on? Isn’t that the strongest point of being open source?

It all sounds very anticompetitive / anti trust to me.
Local laws may vary. In Australia I imagine the ACCC would the place to contact (TIO and ACMA don't sound right)