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.

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.

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

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)

the easiest path would be Chinese phones without GMS like Huawei,OPPO,vivo,Xiaomi,Honor

Of course it's a scam. But its also a money grab and a power grab. Google is completely gone from "do no evil" to "heil Trump"

What's worse, is that I do self hosting and almost all self host apps are open source on the android side, so now I may loose several of those apps if they don't want to sign or are banned by Google.

The developer registers not the app.

And a Pixel - the only device it currently runs on (not a criticism, it's because Pixel is the only device with a TPM).

Lineage runs on a lot more phones. It's nit as secure as Graphene, but arguably more secure than what a phone ships with.

unbeliable.

is that a word i haven't learned yet or misspelling?

They don't care as I understand, they just want to hold an iron grip over their ecosystem

You can still get some Android phones with relatively easily repaired hardware. And for innovative third party hardware your only option is still going to be Android.

I wish there were some way to effectively protest this decision they've made, but I can't think of anything they'd actually care about unless nearly all developers objected.

Sadly they are clamping down on that front too. AOSP is no longer being developed in the open. They are also moving to a standardised internal emulator instead of releasing the "recipe" to build on real hardware development platforms (aka pixel phones)