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A comment on F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree. Parent comment

Re:F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree by pabs3 on Monday September 29, 2025 @04:55AM (#45411649)
The Aurora Store lets you access Play Store apps without having a Google account by using their shared accounts, it is recommended on GrapheneOS (a privacy/security Android fork).

https://auroraoss.com/

Of course government, banking, McDonalds and other apps ban non-Google versions of Android, so you might be stuck with either Google or Apple until lawmakers catch up with this situation.

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-gu...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree by 0312831209381 on Monday September 29, 2025 @06:45AM (#45412194)
Aurora Store is generally _not_ recommended by the GOS folk as it offers minimal privacy benefits over running the full-fat google play within the GrapheneOS Google services sandbox, while introducing supply chain risk.

It is convenient though and I've used it from time to time. I prefer "APKUpdater" for one-off play store downloads which I think uses the same client code aurora does: https://github.com/rumboalla/apkupdater

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Re:F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree by g-b-r on Monday September 29, 2025 @11:08PM (#45421515)
Being able to use a random anonymous account is not a minimal privacy benefit, by the way
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