You can't put an app on the Play Store without a Google Developer account. It's a big market to walk away from.

You can always create a new account to publish apps, you can't get years of mail history back and you can't reset your password to other places once you've lost your email account.

While I generally agree with your statement, we all rely on each other's software to some degree, as it isn't possible for everyone to custom build everything that isnt yet open source.

There should be some impetus for the largest and most profitable corporations to not be /egregiously/ evil.

Google makes its money on search+adwords. Everything else they do is a hobby, and it shows. Not necessarily evil, but sloppy produces the same bad result.

Google makes single-digit billions in revenue from the Android App Store. While not explicitly broken out, the info is in their annual report [0], where "other revenues" are a bit over 10B USD (>10% of total revenue):

"Google other revenues consist primarily of revenues and sales from:

• Apps, in-app purchases, and digital content in the Google Play store;

• Hardware;

• Licensing-related revenue; and

• Service fees received for our Google Cloud offerings."

As an aside, the risks section is surprisingly interesting and honest. A recommended read.

[0] https://abc.xyz/investor/pdf/2016_google_annual_report.pdf

They are not being evil they are just using automation to cut costs that ai in reality is not 100% ready yet. Now for google AI works 99.99% is okay but for the developer or user that falls in the 0.01% it destroys them. People are facing similar problems with Amazon, credit card companies and banks etc where automation helps bring down cost for the corporations but causing problems for 0.01% which is sadly an accpetable cost to corporations.

You're absolutely right. This is a great experience for him, as he now should clearly see what the problem is. Our digital identities are not ours. The OP can make more, a lot more money developing and servicing decentralized identity/related-services than writing 'apps' for 'google play'. Google will be bankrupt within 3 years.