But there’s still a core group of people willing to put up with that and use F-Droid, and having the app used by that group of enthusiasts is better than it not being used at all.

Considering this app is used a lot on older secondary phones, it’s actually very likely people who want to use it would go to the little bit of extra effort required to use it via F-Droid.

I agree, I just wanted to point out Google's anti-competitive behavior regarding app distribution on Android.

Note that you can totally do all of those if you root your device. Highly recommend.

Ah I was wondering what was going on. The newest version of F-Droid updated all my apps with a single one-click update prompt. I remember the pain of previous releases where you had to manually update each and every app.

Rooting is great, where possible. Many cheaper devices though are still unrootable, usually because it hasn't been possible to build a version of TWRP for them.

Many non-cheap ones too, notably Samsung and LG (in the US).

If you want rooting and a bunch of storage, your non-cheap options get harshly limited. Looking for such a phone over the last few months, the options for my carrier were Motorola or bust. Which means getting an Edge, which are goofy and expensive and have defective screens.

So I gave up and got my first unrootable phone, from Samsung.

or by having Privileged Extension (for background installs & auto-upgrading) and a personal repo (for batch installs)

Well the privileged extension requires root, which is what I was alluding to in my post :)

The privileged extension does not require root.

You _can_ install it with Magisk (which also provides root) but it can also be flashed as a regular flashable ZIP (which just requires an unlocked device).

Last (and best) of all, it can be added to an unrooted ROM. RattlesnakeOS[0] for example includes it.

[0]: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack

Not necessarilly. One can enjoy Privileged Extension on an unrooted phone by using a custom ROM, LOS for example.

edit: typo

They've recently announced they're planning on making 3rd party store experience better in Android 12 (next year's version). They haven't shared any specifics.

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/listening-...

auto-upgrading is not a good thing and the play store tries to force it on you