Remember when Microsoft was forced to give a "select your web browser" prompt when setting up a Windows computer?

Quaint times, those were....

You wish it’d be that easy. Building a phone isn’t the difficult part; building an ecosystem around is a huge task.

Where I live, you are almost forced to own either an Android or an iPhone, otherwise it’s tough luck getting banking, secure net identification, way to interact with the government agencies, bus or train tickets, etc.

The endless challenge is that a phone needs to talk to the phone network. The radio manufacturers are deeply in bed with the surveillance state and they are absolutely opposed to free communication. Which means they will never allow a cell phone radio to work with free software.

Platform is not the issue, apps are. Even on a Linux phone you will have to run android apps and you will have to install them from somewhere. And for most apps Play Store is the only place where apps are uploaded.

chucked postmarket os on an old shitbox tablet and its great 👍🏻

looking forward to a spyware free future.

I’m out of breath by this point. You want to scream now of all times?

Linux phones work, but they depend on many Google Android apps to be daily usable by normal people.

What alternative are you going to make? My bank only publishes their app on Play Store. I can either use Play Store app or Aurora to install it. You think that if you build alternative, open source store my bank will publish their app there? You think any bank will? F-Droid already exists, do you see any banks publishing their apps there? Do you see any of them dong Linux version of their apps?

The alternative here would be some other corporation building independent app store and getting everyone to publish their apps there. Amazon tried that many years ago. Maybe Samsung could do it now. It's definitely not something we can make.

Ironically, this hurts Graphene users the less because they can sandbox their google play services.

people treating graphene like the only android OS drives me up the fucking wall, i'm sure it's great but holy SHIT lineage has existed for years and years but.. now it's suddenly irrelevant?

Leaves a bad taste in my mouth

The Play Store requires a Google account. Using a second profile is extremely inconvenient.

They are not blocking the download of the app from playstore. It was obviously not available there in the first place. They blocked API access to the google servers where aurora store was getting the apk files from. They just killed the concept of aurora store (and any alternative playstore frontend) entirely.

What?

and distribute the apks on a different website

Or with distributed technologoes such as torrents. Then it's cheaper to operate any required servers.

There are a bunch of sites like apkmirror etc. that do that but eventually the large ones started enshittifying their service. On apkmirror for example you used to be able to just download the apk's, now they've invented a special "format" that can only be installed through their app. Needless to say that was the end of that, I'm not keen on giving install capability to any more apps than I absolutely have to. (Zero is the ideal answer in case you're wondering, but in practice it's usually one, the system file manager. Any other app can download apk's to /Downloads or go fuck itself.)