Another recommendation for Proton Mail. As others have said I’d recommend getting your own domain for email so you can always migrate providers without having to change your email address.

The reason that Google got ruled against originally was that they were paying and offering incentives to developers to keep them from releasing their apps on other app stores.

Google also doesn’t support a user installing the Play Store themselves (and the required Google Play Services dependency). So phone manufactures have to choose to include it on everybody’s phone from the get go, or their users won’t be able to use it at all.