I haven’t been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with “Oops, you are rate limited”.
This isn’t the first time Google plays at making non-normies’ lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again… for months - to no avail: Google just won’t play ball this time.
Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.
Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: “Oops, you are rate limited”. And my bank sure doesn’t offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.
So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn’t give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn’t care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.
All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.
Fuck Google.
Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman’ed AT&T-style, I’ll never know. It’s long overdue.
Another solution would be downloading the APK from APKMirror. I believe all their APKs signatures are checked against the proper Play Store releases or something like that (don’t quote me on that), but the baseline is that all their APKs should be pretty safe.
As much as I hate Google and the Play Store, I trust it more than third party app stores. APKPure, Aptoide, APKMirror… They all sound a bit sketchy to me. Because if you think about it, there’s absolutely no way to verify that the APK files they serve haven’t been diddled with, since the Google Play store doesn’t give a file hash that would enable me to verify the file’s signature independently. Not to mention, their apps have a knack for displaying obnoxious advertisement at full screen and full volume.
And even if I did trust them, do you find this normal? Why is Google allowed to make me jump through hoops and compromise my security with impunity?
Without mentioning that most of the time (and probably depending where you live) you won’t find your banking app in there, nor in the Aurora Store usually.
Hmm no, if it’s in the Google Play store, it’s in Aurora too - kind of by definition.
I live in a Central American country where I simply can’t find my banking app in Aurora Store or in APKMirror (or any of those sites), and when I search the app name in Google Play it’s there, so I guess it has some kind of logic since the app uses anonymous Google accounts that are probably located in a country where it makes no sense that my banking app is there, I mean, why should my Central American banking app be shown in US for example?
This comment about the app signature should apply to your situation too, you can’t mess with an APK and then sign it with the Google Play keys.
APKMirror is the most trustworthy website there is for APKs out there, if you do some research you will see that the community consensus is it being pretty safe.
I do however understand your concern, especially when talking about banking apps. Honestly now that I think about it, for a banking app I’d rather make a burner Google Account as well. For less sensitive apps however, APKMirror is the best non Google way to get their APKs.
About the app, I have no idea, I only ever used the website (with uBlock).
Obviously it sucks that you need a Google account to access all these apps “properly” through the Play Store, for free apps they should really just let you download them without an account.
my only hope is that with the receding influence of us tech companies we will get more breathing space for alternative foss software in the future.
Spoken like someone from Kaliningrad (as opposed to someone in the US, where US tech companies’ influence is only getting even stronger).
oh fuck you got me!
srsly though, what makes you think that its not declining
I just switched to a degoogled phone and Aurora recently, and it worked fine installing 30+ apps. When you get an error, try logging out of Aurora and start a new session, maybe the current Aurora proxy your phone is using is down
I haven’t seen the rate limitation issue for a couple of months now. The issue is not new, IIRC the Aurora team needs to provide more and more anonymous accounts as the user base is growing. Some months ago we had this problem for more than two weeks. I just checked and Aurora finds no connection, but until today everything worked flawlessly. And I expect it to work again soon.
I feel your pain though. I am degoogled for more than 5 years now and what I learned is that Google will always look for ways to make our life harder. More and more basic functions such as network location were seperated from the AOSP into proprietary google services. I am pretty sure this will get even worse in the future.
We must not forget that we rely on open source software and a hand full if developers, everything can break tomorrow and we are fucked.
Try deleting app data in Settings > Apps > Aurora Store, some data remains persistent even with reinstall, I had a similar problem showed that Aurora is down for maintenance, were reinstall didn’t work but removing data did, go figure.
It makes me nauseous to say this, but I am now considering getting a goddamned iPhone just to avoid Google, trading one shitcorp for another shitcorp.
What other options are there to be de-Googled and avoid the app troubles OP is battling?
I’ve been using GrapheneOS on Pixel 7 for about 5 months now, and haven’t seen any issues. With this, bootloader is also locked, so no issues there.
I noticed I only got the rate limiting error when searching for an app on Aurora, but not to download and install. But how to get to the install page if you can’t search?
I opened Firefox/Fennec on mobile, searched for an app, clicked the result for the Google Play store. Once on the play store page for the app was open, I would choose the “Open in App” option from the Firefox menu and select Aurora.
That would launch Aurora and bring me directly to the App Install page. From there I could complete the installation.
This was sometime in 2023, but hopefully it will still be helpful today.
RCS just got cut for me again today because I’m rooted. At this point I’m spiteful enough that anybody who wants to reach me is going to have to do it through signal.
The egregious part in this is that Google presents RCS as an open standard to get carriers to adopt it. But then they retain enough control to exert their power over users like this. The same happened with Android. I don’t know how long such exploitation is tolerated before such aggressors are split up into a thousand competing businesses.
I would recommend using apkupdater for closed source apks, in particular enabling apkpure repo, rather than insisting on using google repo with aurora store or any other mechanism.
Also looking for FLOSS alternatives if possile (granted things like whatsapp and waze won’t have alternatives for example).
Some metioned apkmirror as the more trusted repo for closed source apps, however it’s currently formatting apks on multiple apks, and supposedly requesting for the apkmirror own instaler, so I recommend apkpure instead, which is also pretty well regarded, and they also in theory offer the same packages as the ones on google play…
For FLOSS apps, the different f-droid repos (official ones and non official ones such as izzy-on-droid) offer a good amount of them.
