If this can happen, is it possible that once mandatory developer verification comes into effect, all 3rd party apps will be uninstalled at first and require a re-install?
Concerning this specific case, NFCGate is a tool on which malware (family) titled NGate by ESET is based, thus likely causing a false positive.
Oh, and no bypass is available anymore (aside from disabling play protect):
Supporting apartheid has nothing to do with antitrust. In fact, there is no law against it at all.
Google does not “throttle access to sites that don’t pay them.” Paying for an ad placement is as old as newspapers. There is no evidence that they additionally down rank sites that have no advertising account with them, and it wouldn’t make any business sense anyway because having nonpaying sites rank highly is what convinces a paying site to pay more to get top of page ad placement.
https://mashable.com/article/google-search-low-quality-research
The paper this is based on
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
Anything to back up your claim about how having sites that don’t pay get pushed to the top is somehow better for google because it makes the ones already paying somehow pay more?
SEO doesn’t mean that the site pays Google. It’s exactly the opposite. SEO means gaming the Google ranking algorithm to appear higher in the organic rankings without paying Google. In the past, people would do this by creating link farms to game the page rank component.