this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
1509 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
74708 readers
3006 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Something kind of concerning I just found - there's an option for "limited distribution" which is "Intended for 'students, hobbyists, and other personal use.'" One of the differences is the following:
Doesn't this imply there's going to be global tracking of what apps people are installing even through sideloading or APKs? I can't think of any other way to enforce this. They would have to know how many times people installed an app even when its not through any kind of app store or even from the internet at all.
I'm pretty sure that was implemented a while ago. My install of VLC from F-Droid started showing up in Play Store's update list.
It couldn't update since the signature didn't match, but Google knew about it and included it anyway.
That has just always been the case as long as the app in both stores uses the same package string. (Like org.blitzortung.android.app or org.videolan.vlc)
Wasn't always the case (I think it changed within the past two years), but upon doing research on when it changed I stumbled on this gem.
"Google would never do something like that" comments just one year ago. Oh my! Google dropped the "don't be evil" motto a long time ago.
It's been the case ever since I started using Android (and modded APKs such as old versions of apps re-signed to not update) in about 2011.
Some of the root apps back then such as Titanium Backup had features to "unhook" an app so it wouldn't appear as installed in the store, but my experience was that it never lasted long enough to be worth doing.
Could be, but that could also just be done locally. Like your phone checking the apps you have installed and seeing if the same ones are on the play store. Having an install limit for an app - assuming that means that the app can only be installed some total number of times globally (a local install limit wouldn't make any sense I think) - necessarily implies that when you install an app through an APK, it has to tell Google that you installed that app so it can track how many people have installed it and not approve installation of the app if it's over whatever the limit is.
If your phone is checking for that information, it's a safe bet it's reporting it back to Google.
Probably. But that might be under the umbrella of optional usage statistics/reporting that you can opt out of. Since this new tracking would be "necessary" for their "security" feature to work, there's no chance that it could be avoided.
I think that's how it works when you have apps with the same name from different app stores, I noticed it with a different app like two years ago.
That's interesting. I was just checking to see if Cromite showed up there but couldn't find it, is there a menu you found yours under outside the update tab? If something as simple as a browser I use is going to be blocked from installs/monitored I can't see why I'd stay in this ecosystem.
They provide the OS, what makes you think that kind of tracking isn't already happening?
App stores provide the apks but then you'll use your phone's installer to actually, well, install the apks.
There are some alternatives to the default apk installers
Presumably that will work like test flight does where you can only install the app through an invite system