100% not true in the US.

Unlikely to be prosecuted or sued, but not true.

What country are you from?

WTO governs a lot of global copyright issues. I would be surprised the fair use exception allows you to download copyrighted content except for a few limited fair use purposes, ie education. And with very specific guidelines as to what qualifies as fair use.

That is certainly not true. It is illegal. It is often civil, but can be criminal copyright infringement based on specific criteria.

I don’t get diarrhea every 4 weeks. Do you?

I think the issue is they’ll have to do much more work to get to those stores if they become remotely popular as a vector for bypassing censorship.

The minute people are using f-droid at scale to bypass controls and censorship, f-droid is going to get firewalled if it isn’t already.

China isn’t on the open internet. It’s a game of whack-a-mole for them, but they’re pretty good at it and throw a lot of bodies at this.

The average user won’t be jumping through the hoops required to make this work.