I suspect making that harder was one of the main motivations, since I highly doubt Google would actually care so much about app sizes in an ecosystem that was already insanely bloated from the beginning. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15442743)

Weakening adblocking in browsers and churning the web "standards" to the advantage of its browser, the increasingly "ignore the user's request" attitude of its search engine, and dumbing-down and hiding information in its products --- it has a technical argument for every single thing it does, but don't let that convince you to think that's the real reason it did that. Google is extremely good at rationalising otherwise anti-user decisions with a technical and positive spin --- it's an ad company, after all, and persuasion/reinterpretation of the truth is what marketing is all about.

Android is still comparatively open as far as mobile devices go, but with each change it makes I can see the walls are slowly rising around its garden.

> since I highly doubt Google would actually care so much about app sizes in an ecosystem that was already insanely bloated from the beginning. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15442743)

Isn't that logic backwards? Precisely because the ecosystem is bloated they're doing something about it in a place they can?

I have to agree. I don't like it either but Android's flexibility still is miles ahead of iOS so it is more of a case of choosing the worse between two bad choices. E.g. I heavily use Syncthing to keep data/media across various devices in sync (mostly Linux and Android); recently we purchased an iPhone so I thought of doing the same setup for managing photos/videos etc and basically, other than some hacky options, there is no clean and seamless solution. Google's walls are rising but I can still pretty easily hop over them compared to Apple's fortress.