I also think there’s no ethical problem. But the latter part seems to be completely legal (so it’s specific to a country’s laws) rather than ethical, which I also agree with.

Why do you think it’s a reliance (without it things will break) rather than a substitutable service?

How about the old contributors using AI to assist coding? Is that ethical?

That patch is manually added. Moreover, some apps have hard binding with their id, making the situation more complicated. Kiwi is not on f-droid at all. They host their own version. It might be easier for the app authors to do it. But f-droid maintainers don’t have this capacity.

The thing is that changing the app id requires too much patching to thousands of apps, and the users will not be able to migrate from the current f-droid version.