Are we going to see decrease in apps available?

GrapheneOS and LineageOS don't ship with any Google services at all, so Google's policies shouldn't affect them.

The OSs aren't forks as far as in aware. So this turd in the water will flow downstream and then it depends. Can they excise this dev database checkup? Or will they fork (or at least try)? I think we have to wait and see.

The availability of apps will probably decrease. Although with the latest advanced flow of the turd that will allow installation after a 24h cooling off period, a restart, a piece of your soul, and your firstborn it will probably not be a bad as we had initially thought. Still shit though.

There is no way in hell that this checkup Google will conduct will be looked at by actual people. This will be automated. I predict this will be a cat and mouse game where hackers will find a way to bypass this, Google will find out and fix it, whereupon hackers will find a way to bypass that, and so forth. As Google will be the mouse in that game, they might tire of it.

They won't affect Android builds that aren't Google-certified directly.

They'll affect F-Droid in that most people won't be able to install most apps from F-Droid without an obnoxious process and a waiting period. That will affect what people spend their time building and will likely result in fewer open source apps being created and maintained.

The turd is in google play services not AOSP so its not upstream of Lineage or Graphene. Graphene should actually be safe because it provides an alternative to google play services. Lineage doesn't but the user isn't required to install google play services. Lineage users might even be able to install Graphene's alternative (MicroG iirc) instead.

The EU DMA compliance is where this gets messy. Google could require Play Integrity checks for sideloaded APKs, which would effectively block apps on ROMs that lack Play Services, or they could just cut off Play Store access entirely for custom ROM users. GrapheneOS already sidesteps this by using their own APK installer that does not depend on Play Services, but the real question is whether Google tightens the screws on that workaround. If the DMA enforcement focuses on 'access to apps' rather than 'access to Google Play specifically,' LineageOS users might be the ones left holding the bag.

It is partly designed to hurt Fdroid. Which will hurt Lineage, Graphene, e/OS, etc. It's all very anticompetitive.

Graphene OS doesn't use an alternative to Google services. It's the OG Google services they use. The only difference is on graphene, it's installed as a user app, not a privileged app.

Fuck Google. First, they create an unnecessary problem because they realised they are losing money to FOSS and, then pretend to be an angel by creating a dogshit way to download apps as a solution to the problem they created themselves.