I've used Android for 11 of the last 12 years, and have appreciated its relative openness and tinkerability, as opposed to Apple's walled garden. Seeing this makes me sad, users are given fewer and fewer reasons to stick with Android :(
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What's wrong with app bundle? asking curiosity I really don't know
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APKs can be end-to-end signed with keys under developer control. You can move between app stores or no store (data is preserved on update with same key). And Google can't fuck with it. (Well, they can fuck with the entirety of the rest of the phone, so that point's kinda moot.)
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App bundles are play-store exclusive and signed with Googles own keys. They pinky swear to deliver an 'optimized' version.
In the future that could mean "we'll just slightly redirect all ad serves through us" or similar, and you couldn't switch your users to a different store.
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App bundles aren't a Play Store exclusive feature and using them as part of the infrastructure for building releases of apps doesn't preclude distribution of apks signed by developer keys. An app bundle is used to generate specialized apks. The developer could be generating them.
For the past year, we've been using app bundles ourselves as part of GrapheneOS. We recently switched back to building an apk for Vanadium because Chromium's build system started tying unwanted things to whether it was an app bundle build. Issue wasn't with app bundles though.
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Well, ok, you can build and use app bundles outside of the play store, but you cannot ever switch an app deployed by play store app bundle to anything else, right?
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For the Play Store, the Play Store generates the apk and signs it, so they control the signing key.
For existing apps, the developer still has the key too and the system supports key rotation so you could start releasing upgrades outside Play with the key rotated away from that.
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