> many stupid Apps check that developer mode is on and refuse to work

Do you have some examples? I have developer mode enabled and have never seen any apps complaining (and I have used a lot of different banking apps).

Almost all banking apps in my country do this, absolutely ridiculous on their behalf obviously

An FDroid desktop client that adb installs APKs would actually be lovely. I pretty much exclusively use FDroid, but I gotta say I unfortunately find all their frontends to be rather buggy and with very little user feedback when things break (repo updates are hard to observe, downloads hang, updates mysteriously fail)

I feel you about the frontends being buggy. Right now I've settled with Droid-ify[1] for doing my F-Droid browsing.

[1] https://droidify.app/

Droidify sometimes does a weird thing when installing apps:

1. Ensure Droidify is not running. 2. Launch it. 3. Tell it to install or update to an app. 4. Receive an Android system prompt to approve the install/update. 5. Approve it. 6. Tell Droidify to install or update another app. 7. Reveive a system prompt to approve the action of step #3 again. 8. Approve it. 9. Receive system prompt to approve step #6. 10. Repeat #6 through #9 for more apps.

Workaround: Do steps #1 through #5.

Foxy Droid doesn't have this problem, but won't auto-download updates for you.

How long before they take that option away?

I've never encountered this or read about it. I believe you could toggle developer mode off after install.

I'm not aware of any apps that check for developer mode, that's mainly root.