You forgot another pro: it keeps the Boston Strangler[0] out of your house. By tying users' hands behind your back you can ensure that you dictate the terms by

You forgot another pro: it keeps the Boston Strangler[0] out of your house. By tying users' hands behind your back you can ensure that you dictate the terms by which they use your work. No piracy, no adblock, etc. This is why game developers largely fell in line with the "Licensed by Nintendo" model back in the 80s and 90s, and mobile app developers did the same thing with the iOS App Store in the late 2000s. They don't want to work directly with users to circumvent the platform owner, they want the platform owner to tie the users' hands, and they're willing to have their hands tied in the process. In the specific case of, say, your banking app; they want secure remote attestation so they can ban users that are running credential stuffing attacks against their app, prevent malware from opening your banking app and clicking the "pay fraudster" button, prevent users from extracting various tap-and-pay related encryption secrets, and also prevent them from injecting stolen secrets into their phone app. The app cannot, on its own, validate that the user's hands are tied; it needs a trustworthy (to them, not you) third party that lives in the boot chain and/or EL3 to validate that. So they don't want to just give you an app and a signature. They want Google to do it so that Google can tie your hands. It's important to note that all the user-facing benefits of app stores are backreasoning. The goal from the beginning was to tie users down, because to them, users are little thieving mosquitoes. This is the "quiet part" that they don't say out loud. Let's hope to dear god that Google's WEI proposal doesn't happen and PWAs never have access to attestation. Google already has the whole "we don't let you login on unknown browsers" nonsense and we don't need that cancer spreading. F-Droid is great. Google's shenanigans with Android need to be shut down. Hell, the EU was able to do that but the US needs to also do that and have it apply internationally. [0] MPAA code word for noncommercial small-scale copying, i.e. someone with a VCR taping shows off TV. Jack Valenti really was a piece of shit, wasn't he?