Provide an F-Droid repository for APKMirror.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

As a significantly more feasible solution to what "#97" states, I suggest that APKMirror provide a repository for F-Droid.

Expected behaviour:

Similarly to what KDE does, APKMirror should provide a hyperlink that contains the necessary information for F-Droid to index it.

Actual behaviour:

No method of automation of installation exists, except potentially some rudimentary parsal of the RSS feed programmatically. However, this is obviously irrelevant for smartphones and the average user.

Steps to reproduce the problem:

Attempt to install more than a few applications via APKMirror.

I doubt that you realize how significantly this is able to transform the experience of using Android without the Google Play Store. It would mostly allow Aurora Droid to become irrelevant due to the potential Policy Violations associated with its usage and Google's impressive profiling that allows them to ascertain who has used it and their associated accounts to ban.

[archon810]

I don't use the F-droid client, so I'm not entirely sure what the answer will be here, but my suspicion is that it would completely eliminate website viewing and attempt to download APKs directly, thus taking the bandwidth and storage we pay tens of thousands of dollars a month for and giving nothing in return (i.e. leeching). If visitors are going to skip viewing advertising, which is our sole source of revenue outside of APKMirror Premium, then unfortunately, I can't allow it (plus there's a cost of development associated with creating an F-Droid repo).

Additionally, isn't F-droid for free and open source apps only?

Please help me understand if I'm wrong on the above conclusions, I very well may be.

[RokeJulianLockhart]

@archon810, to answer your 1st question, I am unable to fault your rationale for why this might be infeasible. However, because of the potentially immense benefits provided to the unfortunate who are unable gain the benefit of a decent package-manager, such as the Play Store, merely due to their unfortunate location of residence, or old device, the sole alternative is making their lives unnecessarily difficult, if this is not adopted. Seems rather like a rock and a hard place to me, though I suppose that financial restrictions make the choice easy for you. :<

If there is any way for you to restrict access to this to members of APKMirror Premium, I know of many people already that would sign-up for this service in a heartbeat, myself included, but that would best be discussed with the F-Droid maintainers. Apologies.

Do you maybe mind testing it anyway temporarily? F-Droid is popular, but definitely not immensely so, so this might just affect the subset of people that already visit your site with an adblocker anyway for the time being.

If all of that is actually infeasible, I suppose that #97 (comment) might be a decent solution, because it would be a very easy method of remediation of both of these issues, even if ultimately incompatible with the official client.

To answer your 2nd question, F-Droid isn't only for open-source software. It is a general-purpose APK package-manager.

However, the common misconception that it somehow solely allows open-source software exists because the maintainers of its default repositories have decided to solely compile open-source software, mostly because it introduces less legal troubles. As with any decent package-manager, the repositories are separate to the package-manager (unlike snap).