Well… for now at least. Who’s to say that won’t be the next thing on their list. They do make a pretty penny on the play store as is, and could improve that if they banned side-loading. And let’s be honest, side-loading is probably a niche thing still.
I have to say that in Denmark at least, iMessage seems to thrive quite well. There are quite a lot using Facebook messenger, but SMS and iMessage is a close second. This is entirely from my point of view. Never met anyone using the examples you mention, unless they are communicating with foreigners on a daily basis.
Lots of ‘mights’ and ‘ifs’. No concrete evidence. Also they write that it might spread out across lots of manufacturers. And not only that, this is an article from when the iPhone 12 got released, which was the first to include a USB-C to lightning adding to the worry.
“We stopped including a charger in the box to help the environment”
Actually this means more boxes are being created in total and this is worse for the environment.
How so? That thought only works if you think they still manufacture the same amount of chargers and package them. Which would be pretty dumb given that they aren’t guaranteed a sell. Also, who doesn’t have a bunch of different chargers already?
As it is now the word “standard” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Google themselves aren’t even done with the specs so it’s not trivial to support all functions when they are not described. So there’s plenty of problems for 3rd party. A bit of info here.