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Comment by CameronNemo | Hacker News Reader

You've got it exactly right. Unfortunately, Google's Play Store is the only source for a number of proprietary applications that work mostly okay on degoogled android systems, including:

* my bank app, and probably your's too

* iNaturalist

* various dating apps such as tinder, bumble, hinge, coffee meets bagel

Edit: wonder if I could use a mirror instead?

Edit2: ugh tried apkmirror. Might work. The client has ads (pretty sure google ads...) and popups. Some of the ads contained a download button? I got confused and concerned. Dipped out. I'll just be more dependent on my workstation(s). Phone still works as a phone, I presume.

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I really wish commercial apps would support alternative app stores. There are far worse offenders than Google, but it's currently quite intrusive and who knows if it won't get worse. I doubt the billions in rent they must collect every year on app sales really go on improving the OS experience.

F-droid repository format would be easy enough to support a commercial repository you could manually activate, with signing and all.

> I doubt the billions in rent they must collect every year on app sales really go on improving the OS experience.

Google has huge numbers of engineers working on Android...

Although I do kinda wonder exactly what they're working on, considering each release of Android seems to be not very different from the previous one...

The larger the number of product devs, and the larger footprint of the product, the more people you need supporting them with tooling and infrastructure of various types.

It won't help with privacy, but if you want to use apps only sourced via the Google Play Store on degoogled, you can download the apk, extract it, and then load and install it on your device.

I use grapheneos and have a separate profile that has GPS installed which allows me to download the apks. Then I adb in and transfer them from alt_profile->computer->no_gps_profile and install it.

it seems you can get iNaturalist also from github: https://github.com/inaturalist/iNaturalistAndroid/releases

i just checked my banks, they are on google play and on the huawei app store, the latter though is not really an alternative i would trust any more than google, and i didn't see if it allows download without an account, but fortunately for myself i don't want banking on my phone anyways, as the phone is the most likely device to break, lost or stolen, nor do i care about those others. but that's just me.

i found apkmirror manageable, thanks to the adblocker i guess.

> Google's Play Store is the only source for a number of proprietary applications

No, that's not true:

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

... which is literally an app to download apps from Google Play Store?

whats your point?

Maybe you're confused about the client and server parts.

The client for Google Play Store can be replaced by other apps like the one you linked. Though this is against Google's TOS.

The server part of Google Play Store is where all the applications live. It is the biggest app repository for Android and most commercial apps are uploaded there. What the GP is advocating for is having developers upload their app to other app repositories in addition to the Play Store.

I'm not really confused, the original comment is just vague. they are looking for these apps, and are only aware of the official client, and other shady sites. I am giving an alternative that can be trusted, since it downloads directly from Google, without using the official app.

Ok, but this statement is still true:

> Google's Play Store is the only source for a number of proprietary applications

Those apps are almost certainly available in the iOS app store as well.

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