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A comment on Google is about to make life more difficult for custom ROM fans. Parent comment

Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by Grimburger on Thursday June 29, 2023 @03:39AM (#36517565)
> Just look how Google effectively broke the AuroraStore App recently.

For anyone who has been hit by this, you can workaround the api issue by long pressing on a playstore http link and clicking open in app (aurora icon).

So you can't search using the app anymore, but if you have the link to what you want you can still install without playstore or a google account.

It's frustrating but isn't the end.

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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by namro on Thursday June 29, 2023 @04:21AM (#36517806)
It's infuriating how hard Google makes it to manually update apps. We really need to dig down that awful play store. Aurora is just there, at the start. Really hope the community finds a way to keep aurora working
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by pyeri on Thursday June 29, 2023 @06:15AM (#36518551)
Not a very clean solution but if someone (power user) wants to avoid the playstore entirely, they can perhaps do so by simply force-disabling the app (using tools like adb), and then use something like apkmirror[1] or apkpure[2] or aptoide to install the APKs for the apps directly and bypass the store entirely?

[1] https://www.apkmirror.com/

[2] https://m.apkpure.com/

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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by vodkapump on Thursday June 29, 2023 @07:00AM (#36518831)
Have you looked at Obtainium? https://github.com/ImranR98/Obtainium It can use apkmirror and apkpure as sources. Along with lots of others.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by COGlory on Thursday June 29, 2023 @09:46AM (#36520320)
I'm not particularly security conscious, but this seems very vulnerable to malware.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by Zuiii on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:45PM (#36529919)
How so?
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by COGlory on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:59PM (#36530014)
How does one verify the integrity of the APK's?
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by vodkapump on Friday June 30, 2023 @01:31AM (#36530875)
I mean, no more than getting things from apkmirror/apkpure? This is just an easier way of doing it.

Personally I mostly just use it with github, and checking the integrity of those apks is easy enough.

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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by 4ggr0 on Thursday June 29, 2023 @10:48AM (#36521121)
The problem with installing APKs directly is that you probably never update these apps again, as you'd have to manually check if you still have the current version and then download the new APK and install it again. At least that's what happened with the apps I installed that way.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by JohnFen on Thursday June 29, 2023 @11:56AM (#36522183)
As someone who loathes auto-updating applications of any sort, this is more of a win than a loss.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by 4ggr0 on Thursday June 29, 2023 @12:03PM (#36522292)
But it's not just auto-update. I can disable auto-update in the Google Play Store, but at least I easily see if updates are available and can still selectively update apps with the press of one button.

For me, the better solution would be F-Droid. Easy update process but the apps are mostly open-source etc.

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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by JohnFen on Thursday June 29, 2023 @12:14PM (#36522464)
Ah, good point. That convenience is not terribly important to me, so I didn't consider it.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by 4ggr0 on Thursday June 29, 2023 @04:35PM (#36526340)
fair :)
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by Rediscover on Thursday June 29, 2023 @06:51PM (#36527952)
It is a win for me not to auto-update, as Termux is very precious (to me) and I would hate to see it lose more functionality or completely stop working.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by deng on Thursday June 29, 2023 @11:19AM (#36521576)
Actually, it seems they have mostly fixed this, but I had to clean the app data to make it work again. Sometimes you get "Oops, you are rate limited", but that was just temporary.
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by tetris11 on Thursday June 29, 2023 @01:38PM (#36523796)
For anyone who is unable to get the "Open in App" to open in Aurora (and not F-droid), check that you've actually clicked on the App webpage and that you're not just in the search page (play.google.com/search?app=blah, for example is bad)
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Re:Google is about to make life more difficult for custom RO... by prometheon1 on Friday June 30, 2023 @03:52AM (#36531817)
Search was broken for me a week ago, but it suddenly worked a few days ago.
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