Although the nice thing about Aurora Store is it allows you to install apps without a google account linked to your device, keeping Google Play Services signed-out.

Somewhere in the FAQ GOS advertises that Play Services can be used without signing in, but they also recommend the official Play Store (which requires signing in) and explicitly don't recommend Aurora (which doesn't).

Unless I'm missing something, I don't see how you can functionally use Play Services signed-out when in order to obtain those apps in the first place, you need to sign into a Google Account for Google Play.

That's personally what I used Aurora for, plus as an easy way to export APK files.

> Google Account that isn't tied to anything else.

At the risk of being a privacy absolutist / fatalist: Google’s entire business model is surveillance. They follow you around and track your habits so you can be influenced. Given that, a Google account is always tied to something else.

> you can sign into the Play Store with a Google Account that isn't tied to anything else.

The problem with this is that increasingly Google is insisting on having a phone number to create a Google account. Further, they are aggressively deleting old accounts that appear to be dormant.

The good old days of creating a Google account with just an email seem to be swiftly becoming a thing of the past.

> a Google Account that isn't tied to anything else.

Isn't that pretty much impossible? You need a phone number for verification, which effectively ties it to that phone number.

It seems wise to have at least one alternative mobile phone app store. Even if it isn't very good. If the government can tell Google to do trivial things like, for example, change the name of bodies (plural now) of water, it can turn off your app updates, trapping you on insecure versions indefinitely. This probably matters more if you live outside of the US, but if I had a plan B for an app store on my phone, I would certainly at least evaluate it.

Sometimes you just can't.

For example, the banking app I have refuses to be installed from the Play Store on GrapheneOS due to "not-certified" device, but works perfectly fine when installed by Aurora.

The check seems to be purely store-based and never enforced later.

GrapheneOS is focused on absolute security. For those of us on more privacy-oriented ROMs with MicroG, we're very happy with Aurora.

Having to have a account is absolutely a downgrade and privacy-hostile.

Doesn’t Google make it very hard to create an account tied to nothing (no phone or alt email)?

"For extra privacy, you can sign into the Play Store with a Google Account that isn't tied to anything else."

lol. lamo, even.

I actually think there's already a lot of us in the 'community' as-is. I personally describe it as 'Valuing Privacy/Freedom over Security'. One pretty clear example of this is how they don't recommend using FireFox Mobile and F-Droid, both of which I use regardless because I'm not willing to put up with worse privacy/usability tradeoffs in the name of (imo 'hyper-')security.

I think it's fine the mission of the project isn't directly aligned with some of us, though I can tell we often get on the core contributor's nerves lol

> I hope it's not too annoying for their community

There's plenty of people like that in the GOS community (the forum and the Matrix). Everyone generally understands that different people have different threat models and may want to do things that aren't the most secure. Otherwise everyone would be using GOS in airplane mode with disabled cameras and only paying for things with Monero.

The core dev team is obviously a bit more security absolutist, but even they usually dont mind

This is standart, and happens constantly with Invidious (youtube frontend). This happened before on AuroraOSS too. They probably just flagged the accounts and no API change or A/B testing an API change.

For me, the issue also only occurs sometimes. Usually I can download apps like normal.

That’s quite the conclusion to derive from a Gitlab issue. Do you mind sharing your thought process or was that just a knee jerk reaction without any reasoning behind it?

Play store works just fine on GrapheneOS. All of play services run in a sandbox.

You can install the Play store from the GrapheneOS App Store.

In fact I'm pretty sure the GrapheneOS folks advise against Aurora Store, etc.

I wasn't aware GOS recommended AuroraStore.

Sailfish OS user on Jolla Phone 2: Aurora is working fine here.

P.S. Sailfish OS is NOT an Android distribution. It is a proper Linux system and they have their own custom Android runtime (AppSupport) as a layer on top for running Android apps. This runtime _is_ Android under the hood, but is separate from Sailfish itself (has its own native app ecosystem).

Play store works fine on GrapheneOS.

AuroraStore uses a pool of burner Google Play Store accounts to facilitate anonymous downloads. This is what happens when those burner accounts get flagged.

GOS recommends play store