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.
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?