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.
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:
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.
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And, F-Droid shows apps that were installed from the Play Store.
Because they both use the same package names…