I don't want to advocate for the Google Play store, but doesn't seem like legitimate technical / privacy reasons. I know it's possible to do push notifications

I don't want to advocate for the Google Play store, but doesn't seem like legitimate technical / privacy reasons. I know it's possible to do push notifications without user accounts - I'm doing that in an app I maintain. But it is tedious to publish Android apps with a personal developer account - you need to run a 2 week test with 12 (used to be 20) users before you can release the app. What prevents law enforcement for ordering the developer to alter the application in a way that reveals user info, maybe the order is simply that they have to hand over their signing certificates for the app?