Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

Google has been been cracking down on installing .apk's on your phone for years and they're getting more and more aggressive about it. It's not a question of if they'll disallow it completely, but when.

It's already extremely tedious. Back in the Android 2.3 days (oh, good old Gingerbread) you could just get an APK and install it, but those times are long gone.

Years ago they threatened the developer of Total Commander to remove his app from the PlayStore unless he patched out an APK install feature, so he was forced to do that.

Now another example: Try to install eBay on a phone that is not passing device integrity. It is not listed on the PlayStore because your device doesn't pass safety checks. You can grab an APK and install it, but the OS will check if the app has been installed through the PlayStore and if it hasn't, it will complain and close itself.

GrapheneOS has patched that bullshit out, btw.

And this behaviour happens with all apps where the developer has enabled the "App Integrity" option, which is heavily pushed as a super-great security feature. So developers might just enable that feature, not being fully aware of the implications.

As you can see, it's one method at a time, slowly but surely, until Google fully controls the ecosystem. The intention behind that is pretty clear: They don't want people to have AdAway and Revanced, they want money and user data. And they also want you to login to the PlayStore, get hooked on their stupid daily points challenges and spend your hard-earned money on virtual crap.

This is textbook enshittification, it will only get worse from here on.