Yeah. This is a point I've been hammering for a long time now. The problems here are not technology related and it's a mistake to look for technological fixes. The same companies that can ban apps from an app store can also ban websites at the drop of a hat, and do. However their behaviour currently when banning websites is considered to be a legitimate use of power, so it attracts no attention.
There is nothing anywhere that would stop Google just adding websites it doesn't like to the SafeBrowsing blacklist. It's just a social convention that they don't. Yet, social conventions have been repeatedly ripped up over the last 10 years or so by political activists who abuse the word "safe" to mean "ideologically acceptable to us". SafeBrowsing is thus a very dangerous thing because Google's management has shown no ability so far to get a grip on the activist wing of their workforce.
Fortunately, there are two mitigating factors.
One is that Chrome at least on desktop lets you disable SafeBrowsing. Of course, they can change that just as easily as they can change the social norms around how it's used.
Another is that Microsoft has built a successful fork of Chromium. I'm using new Edge on macOS right now. It's not merely using Blink, it's actually Chrome but modified and is very serviceable indeed. In fact they just added vertical tabs. Microsoft seems, at least so far, to have avoided the worst of the culture wars and suspicions of bias. If Google did start to abuse Chrome, people who understood what was happening could quickly switch to Edge. Of course, iOS users are out of luck, as always.
However it may be too fatalistic to assume Android apps cannot be distributed outside the store. I've been hearing "people don't install apps anymore" for years now and it's never motivated with real data, just intuitions and anecdotes. People install apps all the time. The biggest breakout hit of the last decade was Minecraft which violated every aspect of hacker groupthink at once: desktop-first, no mobile version, distributed outside app stores, written in Java, no VC backing. I think people talk themselves into believing this isn't possible, but if people want to install an app, they'll do it. Companies that believe they can't survive without app store distribution are typically offering something completely undifferentiated. I don't know how many dating services there are for the polyamorous but I guess there can't be that many. All it takes on Android is to tick a single box and you can install apps (I'm not sure how they can self-update, but nothing stops you dynamically downloading code into your app on Android).
