I haven’t been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with “Oops, you are rate limited”.
This isn’t the first time Google plays at making non-normies’ lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again… for months - to no avail: Google just won’t play ball this time.
Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.
Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: “Oops, you are rate limited”. And my bank sure doesn’t offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.
So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn’t give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn’t care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.
All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.
Fuck Google.
Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman’ed AT&T-style, I’ll never know. It’s long overdue.
I suppose in the case where I’m using Google Play with a Google account, the most likely thing is that I’ll be able to update without a problem because my account is in the country where the app is located, just that it’s using the servers in the country where I live.
In the case of the Aurora store of APKMirror, well, I’m fucked, I guess the only think that I can do is use the website of my bank, that I suppose this will be the case in many banks, the interface and the overall experience is worse than that of the app.
To be honest, is just a shit that many, not to say all banking apps depend specifically on Google to work, it would not be a surprise to me that if I try to install my banking app extracting the APK for myself and then installing it on a deGoogled phone, the app will tell me that it requires Google to work or something like that.
Not necessarily. My bank’s app for instance works perfectly well without Google Play Services. Quite surprising actually, and a relief that I don’t need a separate non-deGoogled cellphone just to do my banking. You might be surprised that yours does too.