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Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

No, they don't need to allow alternative stores on their store. They need to allow alternative stores on Android - which already exist (Galaxy Store, Amazon Store, F-Droid, et. al.)

They just need to give them fully equal status than Play Store (I think they promised this for Android 13, not sure what the state is.)

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what would "fully equal status" mean? for as long as I can remember, as long as you give the store permission to install apps, it works basically the same?

I can only guess, but automatic updates maybe?

The installation process requires extra user intervention vs. Play store.

The big one was the fact that silently installing apps was a privileged permission only allowed to preloaded system apps (with good reason). This prevented 3rd party stores from background updating apps because you had to manually confirm each update via system dialog.

The API seems to have been added in Android 12 actually [1], but I'm not sure if app stores use it already.

[1]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P...

fdroid doesn't. They still have horrible UX for installing updates and it fails to install more than half of the time.

F-Droid mentions Aurora Droid as an option for people who are not content with the F-Droid UX.

That doesn't support it either.

> The big one was the fact that silently installing apps was a privileged permission only allowed to preloaded system apps (with good reason). This prevented 3rd party stores from background updating apps because you had to manually confirm each update via system dialog.

It's been a long time since I last looked at this, but not even Google Play installed apps silently.

IIRC, what Google Play did was to tell the Google Play servers that you wanted to install the app, and the Google Play servers sent a message through C2DM/GCM to a system service on your phone, which downloaded and installed the app. The same thing happened if you opened the Google Play site on your desktop browser, and told it to install an app on your phone.

Obviously, a third party store cannot tell the Google Play server to send that "install this APK" message to your phone; and even if they could, it would have to be one of the APKs available for download on the Google Play servers.

The "system service" you talk about is still part of Google Play Store package. What I'm talking about is an API on PackageManager level (part of OS/AOSP) and not inside Play Store.

The whole mechanism you describe is unrelated to the issue of installing user apps without confirmation for alternative stores.

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