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Comment by snazz | Hacker News Reader

The app updating process in F-Droid is fairly buggy (I can’t tell if I’ve tapped the button or not from the upgrade page and sometimes it just doesn’t work), but in general it is a big improvement.

I’m guessing the “average” person wouldn’t be too happy about losing the Play Store since proprietary apps aren’t available in F-Droid (by design).

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An average person doesn't need to remove Play Store to install F-droid.

But if that average person want to remove Play Store (and Play Services blobs) completely from his devices, he still can use and update the most of his apps using Yalp. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.github.yeriomin.yalpstor...

I had forgotten about Yalp. Wouldn’t you still encounter compatibility issues with apps that require Play Services functionality?

An average person would be amazed by the fact most of apps he is using actually work perfectly without Play Services, despite the fact almost all of them declare Play Services in their manifests as absolutely required.

This stay true even for the games, although some functions like in-game purchases and 'social' things may not work.

> "although some functions like in-game purchases and 'social' things may not work."

Some may even consider that a feature.

No in-game purchases is a dealbreaker but if they are available from the Amazon store that would solve that issue. In-app purchases are way cheaper on Amazon since you can just buy $500 of coins at once and get a significant discount.

For that you want microG: https://microg.org/

Works fine for me.

I used LineageOS with microg on my Nexus 5x for a long time, and it mostly worked. With Magisk Hide I could use my bank apps. But I never got Lyft, Uber, or Bird to work properly.

Have you tried the Uber PWA? It should work with Mozilla's location API (which microg uses).

Thank you for this!

I have been making it a "soft transition", where I don't waste my time trying to remove PS, just look in FD for anything I need.

This will help.

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