Google Play Store is one stop shop for purchasing and downloading apps and games. Google Play Store has gained a lot of momentum in term of getting new features like dark mode, auto playing videos of games and apps and small size app delivery system which helps in delivering apps for targeted device considering its DPI and Architecture like arm/arm64 or x86. Having all these features means you are tied to play store and have to use google play services to get all these things.
There are folks out there who hate Google Services and use it as less as possible, just because of maintaining privacy and being mined by google for personal data collection through Google Play Services. These are the people who prefer open source app more. Other than these folks there are people who likes to get taste of new features rolled out in beta version of apps. Google Play Store allows into opting beta testing but most of the time, the beta testing is limited and you can't join beta testing. It also helps in downloading Geo-restricted apps.
To fulfill the needs of both of these types of people, there are some services which can help you out. I am going to list just two services which I personally found to be trusted and secure. There are thousand of users who trust these services. Of course there are thousand of websites which can provide you with apps and APKs, but those APKs you download from any random site are often not secure.
1. Aurora Store App
Aurora Store is an alternate to Google's Play Store, with an elegant design, using Aurora you can download apps, update existing apps, search for apps, get details about in-app trackers, spoof your location and much more.
Its a neatly material 2.0 designed app store. It is an open source store so it can be trusted more than the other third party closed source app stores.
On first install, you will be asked to login. There are two options here, you can login as an anonymous user or you can use you own google account to login. Its recommended to use anonymous option because your own google account might be suspended if google feels something fishy. Its because it violates some google policies. So its better to login as an anonymous user or use any temporary useless google account.
After this you get a nice white eye blinding user interface (Dark options available :p) with top apps and top games suggestions. You get a tabbed interface below screen having Updates and Categories options. Its easy to know what they do. You can now start searching and downloading APKs of almost all apps.
Features-
- 1. Filtering google apps, which removes google apps from search results.
- 2. Auto Installation after downloading.
- 3. Automatic deletion of APKs after installation.
- 4. Different installation methods. Native installer, Root installer and installing using aurora services.
- 5. Proxy support.
- 6. Themes (light,dark and black).
- 7. Search using package names.
- 8. Spoofing your device.
- 9. Blacklisting and favorite apps
Download - From Fdroid
2. Apkmirror.com
Its not an app, its just a website. Its kind of of crowdsourced apk website where user and app developers both can submit their apps. It allows user to upload apps so you might ask question that whats the guarantee that all apps they are uploading are not modified in any way ? The answer is - Every app that is uploaded on it is verified before it appears on the website.
Apkmirror makes sure that the cryptographic signatures for new versions of all previously published apps match the original ones, which means apkmirror know if uploaded APKs were signed by the real devs or someone pretending to be them. APKMirror.com has been protected from the Janus vulnerability in Android from day one. For new apps that have never been uploaded to APKMirror.com, they try to match the signatures to other existing apps by the same developer. If there’s a match, it means that the same key was used to sign a previously known legitimate app, therefore validating the new upload. . If they see no matches, we try to obtain and compare to a version of the same app from the Play Store or another verified location. If it’s a beta, they will try to get into it. If they can’t, they will attempt to contact the developer. If they are unable to verify the legitimacy of a new APK, they will simply not publish it.
Why use apkmirror ?
- 1. Allow updates to popular apps that are rolling out slowly and may not yet be available to you to be downloaded and installed sooner.
- 2. Get around geo-restrictions and sideload popular apps that may not be otherwise available in your country.
- 3. Provide an archive of popular applications along with changelogs and descriptions, so that you can roll back to an earlier version if a new one starts crashing or removes features you’ve grown to enjoy. You can also use the archive for research purposes to compare changes from one version to another, for example.
- 4. Allow for alternate distribution of select applications, at the discretion of our management and editorial teams.
apkmirror is such a great website and a lot of people keep asking for an android app of it. According to apkmirror devs, it is in work in progress. So you might see a new app sometimes.
I hope you liked the article, please share to your friends and let them know about it. Also tell them to stop fu..ing downloading apps from random websites :p.
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