You need to if you want people to be able to discover your application or receive updates automatically (or with a single click) instead of having to reimplement the wheel with an update checker in your application, as well as logic to limit what countries/markets and devices you serve.
Especially when you consider the hassle for the average user of going into Chrome, downloading your APK, accepting the big scary messages that "the application comes from an untrusted source" and "sideloading applications can be dangerous" and then installing it. People barely even like going into Google Play to download stuff.
If your app is so low effort that even the off brand app stores don't want to host it, I'm going to guess that you're probably also not overly concerned about sending your users automatic updates anyway.
> People barely even like going into Google Play to download stuff.
This might have something to do with the lack of curation, though. Hence, losing a bunch of apps is actually beneficial to the ecosystem. As that snippet was pointing out, lots of these apps were just basic wrappers for text/pdf, which is is what the web and/or built-in media viewer apps are for.
Especially when you consider the hassle for the average user of going into Chrome, downloading your APK, accepting the big scary messages that "the application comes from an untrusted source" and "sideloading applications can be dangerous" and then installing it. People barely even like going into Google Play to download stuff.