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Comment by Aachen | Hacker News Reader

Only on Google store, and an open source google store client (Aurora) just says "failed to fetch app details"... why is it so hard to just put an apk on your website if you actually want people to use your app?

> As well as helping to create new Earth and space weather forecasting models, participants are also in with the chance to win prizes

They seem to be quite keen on getting users and I'd be interested in the data myself (don't care for prizes), but then they make it a Google ecosystem exclusive?

Edit: sent them an email using the address on the contact page. Let's see.

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Android GPS API is quite a bit more low-level than in iOS. You can get data about visible satellites where as (to my understanding) in iOS you can't.

Plus I think the ability to run continuous high precision location queries in the background is severely limited in ios.

And another reason is that some devs, like me, don't want to pay Apple $100 year to have apps on the store, especially if they're free apps.

Yeah, I'm not on some locked-down apple device, I'd just like to run this on a regular Android.

why is it so hard to just put an apk on your website

Then you'd have to field all the "How do I use this file?" and "Why doesn't this work on my phone?" questions yourself.

and _how can i update my app?_

Or you just put the apk behind a big obvious button saying "Advanced users" and a checkbox for users to affirm they are comfortable installing/working with APKs themselves, which is required before the download can start.

You might still get the questions but at least then support teams can legitimately say that kind of advice is not provided as the users agreed to handle such matters.

You put a GIANT Google Play link , and a smaller link for alternative stores that will open a plain html page dense of information and with big warnings to scare away the non-tech people.

Is this an issue with aab files not being pulled through?

Didn't know of Android App Bundles yet, thanks for that pointer!

Basically the aab is supposed to be smaller based on utilizing shared resources. But really it seems like Google is using aab to force devs into using Google's key/ signing management. I have no idea if aab format prevents an app from being in Aurora. It was just my random guess that the format might be causing an issue.

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