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.
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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.
For a new app, the developer doesn't have the key, but they can publish it both inside and outside the Play Store from the beginning. They aren't stopped from using their own keys to sign the apks for non-Play.
They can generate their own apks from the same bundles too.
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You just pass the bundle to bundletool and generate either 1 universal apk or assorted apks as Google does. It's unrealistic to support as many varieties if you actually have to upload them all as apk variants to some store but you can still get substantial space savings from it.
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