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Comment by xxpor | Hacker News Reader

Google already complies with that except the default is one big switch AFAIK on android, it's not per-category.

The non Google Play stores are severely nerfed though - they for example can't auto-update apps installed from them, like Google Play can.

So if you install something say from Fdroid and want to have it up to date (say a Firefox rebuild), you have to periodically open the Fdroid app, check if there are any updates for the app and manually install them if there are some.

Also I don't think you can currently hide Google Play if its installed, again giving it an unfair advantage.

This is probably because I'm running a Samsung os, but I get auto updates from the Samsung store.

Well I actually also have a Note 9 and it seems Samsung stuff generally does not get updated by itself & either stays outdated or nags for update I need to manually trigger.

The vendor has custom modules for auto-updating. afaik F-Droid also auto-updates on freer distributions of Android but not on most manufacturer ones.

Exactly. This is because F-Droid requires root access to provide this functionality. I'm not sure if the module for this is still up to date, but it is a Magisk module that could be installed on any Android device rooted with Magisk.

Stores that are baked into vendor images are granted special privileges to act as app stores.

It's not quite that dire, as F-Droid will pop up a notification when there are apps that need updating. But yeah, you do have to tap through and confirm to get it to update, once for each app.

It is a feature, not a bug. Moreover, I want to be able to roll back the update or install an older version and pin it.

I think having two app stores being installed would (or should) satisfy this.

I think the intention is to prevent Apple saying "either you use our store exclusively, or you opt out of all our apps".

Google lets you install a browser from one store, a game from another, and everything else from the official Play Store.

Google could also easily implement category switching. The URL navigation structure of android could just append ?cat=gaming.

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