Google is killing the .apk format and it's a bad thing

  • It's forcing developers into the Google Play store.

    More details in [0].

    [0] https://www.slashgear.com/android-app-bundles-are-replacing-...

  • Windows 11 makes it possible to install APK, Google kills APK.

    Interesting coincidence.

  • Going to have some meaningful size savings -> play store CDN traffic has got to be pretty incredible.

    I don't think devs were really creating enough APK's on the various device dimensions to do this efficiently themselves.

    They make it sound like you can't distribute your code using other platforms but you can (so far) based on what I've seen (using .apk)

    But smaller app sizes (and the other benefits) are not anti-consumer features.

  • I guess this is the last Google phone I ever buy then. I don't even sideload many apps, I just think it's immoral. To be fair to Google, it did erase "don't be evil" from its motto.

  • It's settled then. It's time for more phone Linux distros.

  • This is not good. It means aurora store will probably break and it'll be necessary to log in with a Google account into the play store :(

    I install all my apps with aurora to cut down on data collected about me by Google. I don't log in with a Google account at all.

    For F-droid it's a lesser problem because they require open source software anyway and make reproducible builds to APK themselves. The problem is just that it's really hard to live with only F-droid apps :(

  • Question: Will this also impact projects who test and observe behaviour of apps like the german https://mobilsicher.de/?

  • I thought that maybe at least PWA apps could be bundled this way, but I can't find anything about it

  • fuck google