by allowing subclassing you have a larger contract you have to maintain when you want to make changes to the underlying class: rather than just the public inter

by allowing subclassing you have a larger contract you have to maintain when you want to make changes to the underlying class: rather than just the public interface, you also need to worry about the protected interface. In other words, if you allow subclassing, then you also have to worry about the interface that you have explicitly marked visible to subclasses. Normally a non-problem, by definition. final is useful when sealing a class that inherits from a parent class with a protected interface, but even if "final" is reduced to an annotation (or even a comment), its presence explicitly limits your end of the API contract.