I was inspired by my partner to start a google free journey on a Fairphone 5.
I use the App Lounge, F-Droid and the Aurora Store.
Aurora Store tells asks me to update Google Play giving the options of updating or deinstalling it, so that it looks like it IS installed on the phone, while I am pretty sure it isn’t.
Also, Aurora Store tells me that the app (Google Play) works without Google Play, which doesn’t make sense to me, because it IS Google Play itself.
I have not signed in with my google account neither to the App Lounge nor to the Aurora Store, nor have I added my account to the microG-App.
Would anyone know what that all means and what I should do about it?
Because as I was about to install the apps I wanted to have on my phone, the App Lounge didn’t work at all. So I searched the web for a solution and I found posts on this forum or maybe on Reddit (or other such sources, I don’t remember exactly) from people with the same issue. Someone gave advice to download F-Droid and, from there, Aurora store. This worked out fine and I could continue setting up my new phone as I wanted to.
But I never had any issues with the App Lounge after that.
Many users here do, because Aurora Store (for Apps from the Play Store) and F-Droid (for Open Source Apps) tend to simply just work (if set up correctly), in contrast to App Lounge and its predecessors in /e/OS.
App Lounge faces a very steep uphill battle to prove itself to users who left any /e/OS default App installer for reasons.
As far as I understand, you also don’t need App Lounge for PWAs, because PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) are just websites which are prepared to be used as PWAs. You can just open any such website in the browser, and the browser menu will have an Install or Put App to the home screen or similar entry for you to add the website as a PWA to your home screen. If a website isn’t PWA capable, the browser will instead just offer to add a simple link to the home screen.
(Just thought I’d mention this, too, before anybody says “But App Lounge has PWAs!”)
Perhaps you could tell me how I might get my FP3 to update apps through Aurora not App Lounge.
App Lounge seems a bit clunky, but it’s where I got my apps from, as I’m not massively tech informed and wasn’t aware of the benefits of Aurora > App Lounge.
If App Lounge works for you so far, you could just stick with it until you encounter an issue. /e/OS developers are putting in time and effort, afterall, hopefully App Lounge would get to a point where users don’t feel any need to abandon it.
But if you want to use Aurora Store and if you want it to not only update the Apps it installed itself, while at the same time avoiding pitfalls such as the one in this topic, then make sure that Aurora Store is not set to only mind Apps it installed itself (via the switch mentioned above), and then use Aurora Store’s blacklist (available via the cogwheel at the top right at Aurora Store’s start screen) to finetune which Apps it should care about.
This means blacklisting a lot of Android system and /e/OS default Apps, but to make this easier you can use the three dot menu there to first blacklist everything and then work your way through the list and disable the blacklisting just for the Apps you know and want Aurora Store to update.
Blacklist entries with check marks are blacklisted, Apps without the check marks are the ones Aurora Store should offer updates for once it finds any.
I definitely appreciate the hard work put in by the devs at Murena / e. Aside from the general difficulties of app and systems development, they’ve taken an ethical stance that probably means them getting lower monetary reward for their work than they might receive at regular tech firms.
For me, that’s more than enough reason to exercise patience with little glitches and bugs.
