Installing updates in the background requires special permissions that require google's blessing. For now, the workaround is a Magisk/Xposed/Lsposed module to give those low level permissions to the F-Droid app.

Not anymore since Android 12. As far as I know, if the installation (or update) of app A through app B is approved once, app B is now free to update app A in the background without a prompt.

Not automatically. It requires the use of a (new in Android 12) API. But you're otherwise right.

Yes, but F-Droid isn't on the play store so it wouldn't matter if they get Google's blessing to upload the app to the Play Store. They can just distribute the app with background installing capabilities from their website like they already do.

Updates in the background sounds... Bad? Not even play store does that to me.

This is the default iirc because that's what works for computer illiterate people. My partner specifically disabled that and does manual updates instead (I don't primarily use the Play store on my own device myself, so I don't have enough experience to judge whether this was user error). Despite that, their weather app got updated at some point after like five years of not updating it, and now everything (startup and detail screens) takes five times longer to load and it doesn't show the cities anymore that they want to see (can only show N on the screen and they iirc used to have 3 more or something). Of course there's no way to downgrade like you could on F-Droid (though, to be fair, it doesn't have releases going five years back, but it would also just never force this and it'd be safe to do updates intermittently because you can always choose "nah, don't like this change, I'll go back").

The closest experience I have is a GrapheneOS device where, after installing the Play Store, it ~daily tries to background install some VR app, no idea what that's about (purple hexagon logo, don't remember the name). I don't want this VR game on a work device. Installation fails because it requires manual confirmation (the store doesn't have background install permissions, which I think confuses the heck out of this google thing which is used to being a backdoor with superpowers) but the home screen keeps doing this animation to show another where this app is now loading, and fails some time later. For some reason it stopped prompting me with every attempt, not sure how I made it do that, but it switching home screens whenever I pick up the device is also annoying.

Background installs are totally a thing on the Play Store.

I use GrapheneOS too. I had that same Play Store prompt to install the purple AR app. "Google Services for AR" or something. For me, I'm pretty sure it was a dependency for Snapchat.

From my limited Googling at the time it seems you will only be prompted to install it if you already have an app installed that depends on it for certain functionality. Do you have any apps that might want to use the camera with AR-like effects?

Personally, I also stubbornly pressed "decline" on all the requests to install it. However, I gave in once I realised that:

1. I was probably the one that caused the install prompt (by installing Snapchat)

2. The shadiness of the app would likely not be worse than the other similar Google services I had already voluntarily installed

3. It would likely not be active except for when I'm using Snapchat

Now I haven't thought about that hassle in weeks.

Phyphox might be the one, I think that has some AR functionality though I forgot for what. Thanks for the hint!

I think it's a good thing overall, because most people would fall way behind on security fixes otherwise.

Apps in general get better over time. As a platform having autoupdates will improve the average experience of your users as they will be using better apps that have less issues and less crashes.

Yes, the play store already does this.

> Apps in general get better over time.

As monetization becomes a bigger concern for a new app/service that was successful, I would tend to think that after a few cycles of getting better apps in general will get worse by increasing the amount of advertisements, requests for subscribing to something and dark pattern usage.

There's also the case of apps getting worse due to some company wanting to deprecate some feature in favor of another that is actually worse (some chat application that changed the way of doing video calls to take three clicks with loading times instead of one click ; some VPN app which changed the method of logging in so it takes one minute instead of one second)

There is a Magisk module that gives FDroid the permissions to do this. I get updates automatically on my phone. Or you can use ROM that already has it built in, like Lineage+microg.