[WhereIsTheTruth]

When you are leader in the market, you want to make sure your competition isn't able to reverse engineer your products, including google

[danpalmer]

Why would sideloading prevent Google from reverse engineering the product?

[zakki]

You meant google can't buy DJI product and Android phone to reverse engineer the product?

[squarefoot]

This, and also they still have the firmware which stays in the drone hardware and very likely is where the most important code is. Cloning the app wouldn't give much advantage to a competitor.

[WhereIsTheTruth]

That's the point, they are not forced to remove some protections to please google and whoever is running Google

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

Drone business is important to the military industrial complex

This however is akin to malware development, i wouldn't want to install such software

[nulld3v]

Google accepts obfuscated apps though (even ones that are heavily obfuscated). I've never heard of anyone getting their app rejected due to obsfucation.