Yeah, but Lineage can just not have the same restrictions. And you can (as I do) run Lineage without Google Play Services or whatever. I get that this change will mean that people with normal Android phones without custom roms will no longer be able to install F-Droid or any of the apps on it, and I get that that means less people will have enough interest in F-Droid to contribute to it or write FOSS apps that I might want to be able to run. But the only reason I can think why that could result in the complete cessation of F-Droid development or package maintenance is if nobody runs custom roms moving forward. (Or F-Droid shuts down completely symbolically as a protest.)

This part of the Register article almost set off my alarm bells:

In March this year, Google also made a change to the way AOSP is developed; the public aosp-main branch is now read-only and development takes place in a private branch, with code published from time to time as android-latest-release.

But it sounds like the AOSP updates still do become FOSS eventually. Just not as soon as they used to.

This might end up being enough to get me to switch to some Linux phone for my next phone, but it's not like I wasn't strongly considering it before this news came out.

I dunno. I still suspect it's not going to affect me directly as badly as most F-Droid users. And don't get me wrong, Google is still complete assholes for doing this. But it's not going to affect my phone for a good while.