I am not very well educated when it comes to alternative stores landscape. But I do know that in Russia there's now Rustore: https://www.rustore.ru/en which functions by automatically downloading and updating APKs for you.

During the APK install, however, you do see the ugly Android prompt about how this app may be dangerous.

Rustore has its own app payment system, which obviously circumvents Google Play fees.

This works on regular Android phones.

Are there other examples of such stores? Perhaps it's Google's answer to that.

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hexfish 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

F-Droid and derivatives are really popular in the FOSS community.

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swe_dima 6 hours ago | parent [-]

oh, right! Didn't have my coffee yet :-)

But one difference is Rustore actually has payments and subscriptions, which hurts Google more.

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necovek 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I was expecting Google has stopped doing most of the business in Russia due to sanctions. Do you still see Russian-company ads in Google Search results or Youtube? Similarly, I thought they were not selling apps or ads in Google Play store in Russia either (they might be showing ads from non-Russian companies because, well, that just increases the show-count and absolute number of clicks).

	▲	swe_dima 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I no longer reside in Russia, so I am not being targeted by these. But I think that it mostly comes down to companies being able to pay for these ads. Mastercard / Visa payments no longer work in Russia. If a company has a way to pay (by having another business entity in another country), then it probably works.

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ReptileMan 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unfortunately both Russia and Ukraine are slacking in losing the war so it doesn't seem that making payments to Russia will be easy soon. Now of course if they were Uzbeki or Kazakhstani stores it would be completely different.