Essentially the apps have same package name but different signatures and the app store that installed it should be the only one to recognize and update it.
But Google is likely trying this dark pattern to sway people away from F-Droid or alt stores by making users uninstall these apps and install it from the Google Play Store.
It’s been going on for a while and is annoying af.
Yeah the worst part of it is that the version on Google Play is actually the older version.
They are shown on the update page for Google’s benefits only. This is anti customer.
yea, and people here suggesting f-droid to change package names are crazy. F-Droid’s goal is not to mess with developers code at all and provide builds as is from the source code.
Since I found out about F-Droid and Aurora Store, I’m actively dodging the Play Store. No one will ever make me use it. Ads, promos, junk everywhere! And their shitty way of updating.
Actually, I had it just the other way around. I had an app that had an old, orphaned version on F-Droid and a newer one on Play Store, so I installed the one from the Play store, but F-Droid desperately tried to update it constantly, always failing, always spamming me with messages about it
It’s just cause it has the same package name and only checks the signature on attempt to install not cause Google has some alterior motive
It’s relatively new behaviour so they introduced it recently. And they need to fix it, but ignore it entirely…
The, being F-Droid, need to fix this, yes. They really should.
Even if it’s new behavior, there is really no reason to assume that this was done to evoke some dark pattern or other. It just shows that Google will not think about 3rd party stores when they do anything with their services and that is hardly news, is it? Besides: I kinda get it honestly. If they’d take all the stuff out there for android into account before they did anything, nothing would be done at all.
So the question becomes less why that’s there, but more what stores like Samsung do to prevent this issue and if F-Droid can adapt the same behavior.
Samsung just says:
Can’t auto update Installed from Google play store. And Can’t auto update Installed from Aurora store.
You can easily see from what store an app has been installed in android.
Maybe that’s true, but then:
- They previously had code to prevent this, why did they remove it?
- Why won’t they fix it now? I’ve reported this twice already and I’m not the only one, this is affecting a huge number of users, why are they ignoring it? I refuse to believe they’re not aware of it. And if they aren’t aware of it that points to an even bigger issue of having absolutely no idea the repercussions of that they do even when thousands/millions of users reach out to tell them.
I think you massively overestimate the amount of users that are a) affected by this b) reporting it When seeing the overall picture, this might mlbe a rather fringe issue in Google’s eyes.
Furthermore, you might be exaggerating the impact as well. The “impact” is that an app update fails. That’s it. That might be annoying, but isn’t the grave and evil thing you make it out to be.
Besides, have you ever thought about that this stems from a rather bad practice on F-Droid/app developer side? They use the same package name for a software with a different signature. That’s just not ideal to begin with. All packages with the same name should have the same signature for any given version of the package. That’s how security works. If they don’t follow that, how is a user/security software supposed to check if the signature is authentic or of the package was tampered with?
Mismatched signatures have been discouraged since day one of Android. A mismatched signature is a sign that some one other than the original publisher built this package, and the user needs to be aware that it might be malicious.
That F-Droid went with this setup with mismatched signatures was always going to make their apks look suspicious.
You misunderstood the whole situation. The signatures are all fine. Google Play Store is trying to override an app installed from F-Droid. If the two stores had the same signature, the play store would be able to do this which would go completely counter to the user’s choice (they installed from F-Droid for a reason). It’s a good thing the signatures don’t match, there’s nothing suspicious about it.
It used to be that the play store just wouldn’t show updates to apps that it wasn’t actually able to update. They broke this behaviour.
No, it’s not a good thing. The solution would be to use a different package name for the f droid version. That’s what’s supposed to be done. It’s not the signature or Google that’s causing the problem. It’s that there are two packages with identical names that should not be identical.
And, F-Droid shows apps that were installed from the Play Store.
Because they both use the same package names…
Jokes on them, I don’t want them updating anything without my direct approval, and I don’t insist on the most recent version of anything non critical. Idgaf about their bullshit
Yes because they are signed with different keys
This is an f-droid problem. If they use the same package name, they need to use the same signature. That has been the case since long before f-droid existed.
They could just build apks with alternate package names and this wouldn’t be an issue.
Why would anyone who actively chose to install F-droid, reinstall their apps as Play Store apps?
Fedilab and Thumb-key are not free on Google Play, I would reinstall them there if it was possible
I have this happening on Sync for Lemmy. Every time I open it if there’s an update available, with no way to tell Play to fuck off.
But Google is likely trying this dark pattern to sway people away from F-Droid or alt stores by making users uninstall these apps and install it from the Google Play Store.
No, it’s the security measure. Anyone can use existing package ID. If the user installs a different app with the same package ID as the other, that new app just overwrites the old app and will have access to the sensitive data of it.
F-Droid apps are built and signed by the people at F-Droid. Apps from Google Play and GitHub are built and signed by the developers themselves. You can update Google Play apps from GitHub and vice versa. That’s why I use Obtainium over F-Droid.
Samsung store does that too. It’s quite annoying
I don’t care that it can’t update these apps, since I use Obtainium. But, FFS, at least let users have an option to ignore or hide those apps.
The same happens in reverse. It’s the natural result of not naming the packages differently as a dev.
You could get rid of Google play
