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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

the whole point of using an alternative app store is to be able to install apps that are NOT approved by google. if google is the only allowed arbiter of what may be installed then we are no better off then using the google play store, because i find it highly unlikely that google would approve an app that it would not allow on the play store as well. (ok, sure, an alternate app store would also get around google taking a 30% cut, but that's less important for me)

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> the whole point of using an alternative app store is to be able to install apps that are NOT approved by google

No, the whole point of using an alternative app store is to get better deals for developers or end users. Apps that are not approved by Google can still be installed. The whole point of app verification is to allow installation outside a system app store (e.g., directly from a website or from another app store) without any scary warnings, as required by the judge's ruling.

You say this like the scary warnings aren't an entirely artificial barrier by google. Before the app verification, I could install apps from freedroid just fine without any scary warnings.

> Before the app verification, I could install apps from freedroid just fine without any scary warnings.

All Google Android builds show a scary warning before you can install apps outside the system app stores. That's why the judge's ruling required Google to do away with the scary warning, leading to app verification, which accomplishes what the judge required. If you don't use a Google Android build, neither app verification nor the new unknown source installation flow affect you.

They showed one warning once when I installed Freedroid, and that's it. There was no extra steps needed on each install from Freedroid.

It was one warning to install F-Droid (to allow installs from the app that downloaded it) and another warning to install your first app from F-Droid (to allow installs from F-Droid). The judge said those warnings were unacceptable. Hence, app verification.

And not, hence, getting rid of the warnings? Because F-droid is going to have even more warnings now.

App verification is what gets rid of the warnings. That is the entire purpose of its existence.

most if not all apps on f-droid are not going to be verified mostly because many of the developers are unlikely to be interested to submit those apps to google for verification.

The judge unfortunately didn't ask Google to solve for F-Droid's use case, but app verification doesn't change it at all except for apps whose builds are reproducible, which F-Droid can serve the developer's signed builds for, and which the developer can register with Google.

Instead, as I pointed out in my original comment, we need to complain about the upcoming "advanced flow" for unknown source app installation. It should not but does require enabling developer mode. It should and does save the user's preferences for unknown source installation across device updates.

That is not what google says. And it's not what it actually does, either. It creates more, scarier warnings in the case of installing an unverified app.

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