Apps now block sideloading and force downloads through Google Play
androidauthority.com
androidauthority.com
I kind of feel like I repeatedly observe a bit of cognitive dissonance among some users on HN (not suggesting josephcsible is). There's often a lot of discussion about 'freedom' but what most often mean is 'my freedom'. This is about balancing the freedom of content producers/rights holders to choose the methods of distribution of their content, and the freedom of content consumers to choose how they'd like to receive their content. Not sure where the line lies but talk of 'morals' seems like trying to simplify a non-trivial problem.
And I don't give much of a crap about copyright owners. Copyright in its current form mostly doesn't work for its intended purpose anyway, it only works for corporate rent seeking.
Zooming out, fighting against DRM APIs is not even a hill worth dying on. Stopping it would mean attacking a healthy and legal market that has multiple worse alternatives they can roll out. A more realistic goal is separating App Stores and App runtimes, to prevent anyone from conflating the two and playing keep-away with basic functionality of devices that people own.
The freedom I don’t have is to demand the market supply a “Goldilocks” device that meets all my requirements. The fact that Fairphone exists tells me that there’s no structural impediment to the market providing such a device. Their market share reflects the number of people for whom the kind of freedom you want is valued above other requirements.
It sounds like just this, only all wrapped up in a "let us protect you" wrapper.
The user is left with an app that won't be updated or get bug fixes and may not even work at all because of ongoing changes in the game server and its APIs.
Our game was entirely free to play and there was no way to get any additional stuff by using a side loaded APK from someone else.
To make matters worse, users put themselves at risk when they enter their personal information like passwords and payment info into these illegitimate APKs as it can be captured by modified versions of the apps, which is why folks distribute them.
I spent a couple days trying to deconstruct what the apk sites bidding on adwords for our brand (ecommerce free app) were doing. Proxied traffic and didn’t see anything fishy. Chalked it up to ad arbitrage in the end. Didn’t seem like getting people to download the apk was the primary goal.
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But if people are modifying your APK anyway, wouldn't they just remove this check too?
Developers should have the right to decide how they make their software available to users.
Yes - bypassing incorrect assumptions.
For example, a US company I worked for at a non-US office (imagine it was e.g. Google Japan) gave most employees a corporate credit card. Citibank made it impossible to download their app through the Play Store from the country in question, even though it was required to use it. Only option was to sideload it.
This kind of thing has happened on other occasions as well.
In the past it was magisk in there, since I can't root my current phone I don't have magisk either. My only way to use online banking is copying the app into my work profile profile, or using an older version which I have to sideload from apkmirror.