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A comment on Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote app store competition. Parent comment

Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by m4rtink on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @09:41PM (#28150623)
The non Google Play stores are severely nerfed though - they for example can't auto-update apps installed from them, like Google Play can.

So if you install something say from Fdroid and want to have it up to date (say a Firefox rebuild), you have to periodically open the Fdroid app, check if there are any updates for the app and manually install them if there are some.

Also I don't think you can currently hide Google Play if its installed, again giving it an unfair advantage.

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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by xxpor on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @09:51PM (#28150686)
This is probably because I'm running a Samsung os, but I get auto updates from the Samsung store.
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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by altantiprocrast on Thursday August 12, 2021 @12:03AM (#28151747)
The vendor has custom modules for auto-updating. afaik F-Droid also auto-updates on freer distributions of Android but not on most manufacturer ones.
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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by sureglymop on Thursday August 12, 2021 @02:59AM (#28152943)
Exactly. This is because F-Droid requires root access to provide this functionality. I'm not sure if the module for this is still up to date, but it is a Magisk module that could be installed on any Android device rooted with Magisk.
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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by m4rtink on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @10:58PM (#28151213)
Well I actually also have a Note 9 and it seems Samsung stuff generally does not get updated by itself & either stays outdated or nags for update I need to manually trigger.
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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by heavyset_go on Thursday August 12, 2021 @03:55PM (#28160713)
Stores that are baked into vendor images are granted special privileges to act as app stores.
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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by kelnos on Thursday August 12, 2021 @12:36AM (#28151991)
It's not quite that dire, as F-Droid will pop up a notification when there are apps that need updating. But yeah, you do have to tap through and confirm to get it to update, once for each app.
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Re:Senators introduce bipartisan antitrust bill to promote a... by drran on Thursday August 12, 2021 @04:07AM (#28153462)
It is a feature, not a bug. Moreover, I want to be able to roll back the update or install an older version and pin it.
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