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Comment by kornhole | Hacker News Reader

This is a major problem for most people with a degoogled phone. Luckily I am using Graphene which provides a sandboxed Google Play services. This means that the only access you need to give it is network access rather than the promiscuous normal access it has to just about everything on your device. https://grapheneos.org/features#sandboxed-google-play

It would be helpful if others can share here how to extract and install APK's outside the Play store.

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> It would be helpful if others can share here how to extract and install APK's outside the Play store.

I use APKPure. I have the suspicion that it must be some kind of malware/spying operation, but I couldn't find any proof so I kept it. Another HN user [1] followed up on a comment on mine on the topic and they didn't find anything particularly strange either.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32409557

APK Mirror seems to be a more popular option: https://www.apkmirror.com/

Created by https://twitter.com/ArtemR which is known in the Android space.

Graphene OS is a very interesting option but it only runs in Google's Pixel phones for now, so I'm waiting for the day it could be installed in other devices.

You might be waiting a while. If you read the documentation I think they get into to the reasons for that pretty thoroughly. As a side note, I think the prices for 5's and 6's is pretty reasonable right now (they seem to have fallen a bit from a year or 2 ago).

I've always loved the irony of needing a Google phone so that you can run an OS the de-Googles your phone.

IIRC the devs are only supporting Pixel devices because they are at least vaguely sane.

Supporting random other devices would be a nightmare.

Absolutely loving GrapheneOS for the past year plus. It's my primary device and I have no problems.

> how to extract and install APK's outside the Play store.

https://github.com/4cq2/googleplay

The linked thread claimed you can still create a Google account and use that to sign into the Aurora store. They only ban the shared accounts.

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