The first comment on the issue is hilarious…

Might as well start a online petition, because that’s how effective this will be.

While I agree with the concept of this project, I definitely agree with what Marc said on on the page.

This will be a double-edged sword for anyone who wanted to involve themselves with that pledge because chances are, unless they are a huge application that has a major user base, The concerns that he gave with Google just deprioritizing the list in search is absolutely valid.

The solution to that, if there was enough pledges for doing it, would be keeping the list private until it’s to the point of it being large enough that Google couldn’t de-prioritize it on a large scale, but that risks the following of less visibility of who’s on the list and how much support the project has. plus if the project never gets a reasonable amount of developers on it, like he said, it can be used as ammunition of, well, it’s just a few very vocal outliers so obviously it’s not that big of a deal

it’s a sticky situation because as a dev, I fully agree with their cause, the forced developer verification is absolutely bullshit, But I also realize that Google has a pseudo-monopoly on applications on Android, unless you have a fairly significant user base, who are willing to go through the steps of installing a third-party launcher such as f-droid. It will pretty rapidly kill both discovery and engagement with your app.