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Comment by Grimburger | Hacker News Reader

> Just look how Google effectively broke the AuroraStore App recently.

For anyone who has been hit by this, you can workaround the api issue by long pressing on a playstore http link and clicking open in app (aurora icon).

So you can't search using the app anymore, but if you have the link to what you want you can still install without playstore or a google account.

It's frustrating but isn't the end.

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It's infuriating how hard Google makes it to manually update apps. We really need to dig down that awful play store. Aurora is just there, at the start. Really hope the community finds a way to keep aurora working

Not a very clean solution but if someone (power user) wants to avoid the playstore entirely, they can perhaps do so by simply force-disabling the app (using tools like adb), and then use something like apkmirror[1] or apkpure[2] or aptoide to install the APKs for the apps directly and bypass the store entirely?

[1] https://www.apkmirror.com/

[2] https://m.apkpure.com/

Have you looked at Obtainium? https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium It can use apkmirror and apkpure as sources. Along with lots of others.

I'm not particularly security conscious, but this seems very vulnerable to malware.

How so?

How does one verify the integrity of the APK's?

I mean, no more than getting things from apkmirror/apkpure? This is just an easier way of doing it.

Personally I mostly just use it with github, and checking the integrity of those apks is easy enough.

The problem with installing APKs directly is that you probably never update these apps again, as you'd have to manually check if you still have the current version and then download the new APK and install it again. At least that's what happened with the apps I installed that way.

As someone who loathes auto-updating applications of any sort, this is more of a win than a loss.

But it's not just auto-update. I can disable auto-update in the Google Play Store, but at least I easily see if updates are available and can still selectively update apps with the press of one button.

For me, the better solution would be F-Droid. Easy update process but the apps are mostly open-source etc.

Ah, good point. That convenience is not terribly important to me, so I didn't consider it.

fair :)

It is a win for me not to auto-update, as Termux is very precious (to me) and I would hate to see it lose more functionality or completely stop working.

For anyone who is unable to get the "Open in App" to open in Aurora (and not F-droid), check that you've actually clicked on the App webpage and that you're not just in the search page (play.google.com/search?app=blah, for example is bad)

Actually, it seems they have mostly fixed this, but I had to clean the app data to make it work again. Sometimes you get "Oops, you are rate limited", but that was just temporary.

Search was broken for me a week ago, but it suddenly worked a few days ago.

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