What are the best alternatives to official app stores?

/e/OS Foundation & Community
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Honestly getting really tired of both Google Play and Apple App Store at this point. Google keeps removing apps randomly and Apple’s review process is a nightmare for smaller developers. Not to mention the 30% cut they take from every purchase.

Been looking around for proper alternatives and found a few worth mentioning:
F-Droid - great for open source Android apps but the selection is limited if you need mainstream apps.

  • Aptoide - decent option for Android, larger library but you need to be careful about app sources.
  • Aurora Store - works as a Play Store client without needing a Google account which is nice.
  • Scarlet iOS - for iPhone users this one is genuinely good. Lets you sideload IPA files on non-jailbroken devices for free.

Anyone else using something different? Would love to hear what others have settled on especially for iOS side of things.

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in the category opensource and F-Droid there’s also:

  • Obtainium is great to fetch directly from arbitrary http sources, git forges etc. One can get Signal this way and it is officially endorsed
  • Accrescent can be installed through the browser and is technically sound
  • sebaubuntu offers packaged LineageOS Apps

as to playstore mirrors:

  • there still is cleanapk, but it doesn’t get updated for Playstore apks since /e/OS AppLounge switched to directly rely on the Playstore (as Aurora)
  • apkpure, openapk, aptoide - doesn’t matter which mirror you pick. If the apk signature verifies to what is widely used, it is safe on first use - subsequent updates check the signature.
    The issue: there’s no public and independently trusted directory of the signatures, but many mirrors show a fingerprint. To be sure, you’d have to figure it out yourself. Whatsapp used one cert for 15 years, so for top1000 apps a directory wouldn’t be too hard to create really.
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I’ve been using APKUpdater on Izzyondroid through Fdroid.