It's not moving in what I would call my preferred direction, no. At the same time, I understand the kinds of pressure that Google are under from various governments - likely why this is being rolled out in specific countries to start with - and the need to introduce some amount of friction to shut down the kind of attacks where the victim is being persuaded to install an app from an external source, which are completely eliminated under the new scheme.

Am I necessarily happy with it? No. Are the methods around it sufficiently flexible that I will be able to live with it? Yes. I have no trouble installing anything through adb, and the first thing I will do after the change rolls out is to disable it, meaning that after 24 hours, I am essentially back to the current state of affairs.