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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

Its functionality is hindered by Google in that it can not download and install updates in background as Google Play does.

One has to root the phone and loose access to banking and SSO apps to get enough permissions for F-Droid.

EU anti-competition monkeys should have looked at that a long time ago.

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According to https://www.xda-developers.com/android-12-alternative-app-st..., it could do it, it's just not implemented.

Given that trying to update a package from the notification just yields an error and this issue hasn't been fixed for 5 years (https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/669) and the F-Droid repository is known to update so slowly that most devs recommend adding their direct channel, F-Droid doesn't really feel like a usable alternative.

I think unfortunately the best bet here is to wait for some commercial player to step in and make a decent alternative.

I use something called Insular[1] to install some apps in a work profile so they don't have access to my personal contacts and activity.

A nice unexpected benefit has been that Insular does background installations and updates of APKs. When I click "update" in f-droid, I now choose Insular as the handler and it happens in the background. It's much more reliable than however f-droid does it internally.

[1] https://secure-system.gitlab.io/Insular/

Is this something that only happens with some banks? I have GrapheneOS on my Pixel 6 with F-droid, and the banking app of ABN AMRO from the Play store just works.

In my experience the ING NL app also works perfectly fine on rooted devices. You can usually apply a working Magisk Hide plugin relatively easily for apps that don't support it.

I suspect that some banks use a whitelist rather than a blacklist for certain phones.

Some also check for other signals indicating root - for example, if Samsung Knox shows up as enabled in the build properties, but accessing it fails with an exception, the phone was rooted at least once (even if you re-flash an official firmware and re-lock the bootloader, the Knox Secure Enclave stays dead).

Tricking out these detections is a nightmare.

Yeah, Samsung is pretty bad (or good, depending on your point of view) when it comes to this stuff. I would never root a Samsung phone because of this mess.

The problem is you're effectively stuck with either Google or Samsung if you want decent performance, update availability, spare part support and the security of not having Chinese spyware embedded on order of the Chinese dictatorship. And Google is known for delivering absolute lemons as hardware, with next to zero support to make stuff worse.

KBC and Itsme are hard to trick into working with a rooted phone. I tried and dropped the ball at some point.

My Pixel 5a is not rooted, and I have F-Droid running on it, from which I've installed several apps.

Do theses apps automatically update in the background without you having to do anything?

yes, but you have to manually update those apps

Which is a huge pain because you can’t just spam click update or “update all”. You have to one by one wait for them to download and for the android UI to come up and then wait for the install to finish before starting the next one

Android 12 supports background updates: https://developer.android.com/about/versions/12/features#aut...

Yes, but f-droid et al cannot update in the background. That's a problem.

I consider that a good feature. I decline about half the updates. Some of those "simple" family tools have had "updates" that add nagging and attempts to get you to upgrade to a paid premium version.

Being able to selectively turn auto-updates off is a feature. Not having a choice is not a feature.

That's on F-Droid though...

And they try, but Google makes you root your device to install a service level apps to handle that stuff in the background.

Sorry if I'm appearing snarky but that's the whole point of this thread. Google obstructs third-party app stores.

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.fdroid.fdroid.privileged...

This used to be true, but as the comment you've responded to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31424242) explicitly explains, since Android 12 you don't need to root your device and install the service level app. There's a new API specifically to allow apps like F-Droid to update apps they've installed, F-Droid just didn't get around to using it yet: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidclient/-/issues/2316

Well that's very silly of me.

On further reading, that new API seems to only allow updating apps which also support that new API. There might be a good technical reason for that, but it's a barrier to entry that Google doesn't have as a first party.

I think the apps don't have to explicitly support that specific API, they just have to target a modern Android version. Google technically doesn't have that restriction, but nevertheless imposes the same restriction on the Play store.

(Not saying it's appropriate to impose the "devs must update apps for each Android version" requirement this way.)

My OnePlus 6 is rooted (with Magisk) and I do banking with it all the time.

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