> I suspect this is to foreclose against a future option for Google to monetize ‘free’ content in the play store without compensating the developers much as th

> I suspect this is to foreclose against a future option for Google to monetize ‘free’ content in the play store without compensating the developers much as they do people’s videos on Youtube. As the distributor, Google may feel empowered to make these sort of “protective” changes, and the one that would be most likely (in my estimation) would be wrapping the APK such that it played a pre-roll ad before your free game started. I'd be quite surprised if Google forced ads into apps that don't have them, knowing full well that Apple would not do the same thing for iOS apps. While Google and Apple are in different businesses, they are both reliant on the same set of users for their different business models, and from users' perspective, they offer products that are both competitive and mutually exclusive (very few people use both an Android and iPhone daily). It's one thing to force ads in front of Youtube videos - a given video is hosted on one platform, and users click links to the videos they want to watch with little sense of loyalty to a particular platform in the moment. But doing the same thing to mobile apps across an entire operating system risks people actually eschewing their product in favor of their competitor's, which would jeopardize the core of their entire business (search revenue is incredibly vulnerable to traffic on walled garden mobile platforms - it's the reason Google correctly saw iOS as such a threat and responded quickly with their investment in Android in the first place).