Very long ago I decided never to set up my Android devices with my Google account. This even though I keep using the straight Google Android system and I eschew the replacements such as Lineage OS, because I’m scared of the manipulations needed to install these. In a way not connecting the account was an easy decision, at least back then, because there was little to gain and much to lose. The Google features I need on my mobile device — Gmail, maybe Maps, are all available through the browser; for anything else I wanted from the device there was always an app or three on the excellent f-droid site. On the other hand, had I connected the account Google would have been able to follow me literally everywhere.
Recently, though, I felt pressure to reconsider, at least temporarily on a “sacrificial” device which I no longer use at all and which is still in my possession only because it is so damn hard to recycle them. The precise circumstances when I wavered thus will be covered in other posts; for now I’ll just write about the general situation.
The Google app store — Play Store is the infuriating and
insulting name Google calls it — contains both gratis and paid
apps. For the paid apps, it makes total sense that I have to get them
there if I want them, and of course the only way to use the store is
to be logged in to my account. What makes much less sense is that
Google would like to restrict the gratis apps the same way. If I
want to install a gratis app A on my phone, and the authors of A
chose the Google store as their distribution channel, I can only
do so with the Play app — which of course requires that I have
connected my Google account and I’m logged into it. Or that’s what Google wants.
Furthermore, apparently I cannot download a package of A from
the store, but I must directly install A on the device running
the Play app. This defeats the obvious workaround of downloading
a package of A on a desktop computer while I’m logged into Google
there. And to box me in completely, Google also doesn’t give me
a way to repackage A once it is installed, at least not a normal
safe way that doesn’t require rooting the device or other black magic.
So, my sinful idea of installing A on a sacrificial device and
then reusing an A package on a device where I actually needed it
was useless anyway.
By the way, the f-droid app lets me export any installed app to an apk package which I can then move to another device and install it there. I use this trick periodically to download apps only once and save precious bandwidth.
The Alternatives
It turns out the situation is not quite so dire. There’s a number of sites — not sites I’d call inviting for a nobrowser, but they’ll do when I’m in distress — which provide downloads of apk packages of gratis apps from Play. Here are the ones I bookmarked:
Now I’m looking forward to decades more of a Google-free phone.
Question
How do these sites manage to extract the apk packages? Can I replicate that process and extract them myself? Does it take black magic with the device or can it be done, say, with adb and the unix tools?