from Hacker News

Google is killing the .apk format and it's a bad thing

by boba7 on 7/2/21, 5:37 PM with 12 comments

  • by aliasEli on 7/2/21, 5:47 PM

    It's forcing developers into the Google Play store.

    More details in [0].

    [0] https://www.slashgear.com/android-app-bundles-are-replacing-...

  • by croes on 7/2/21, 11:29 PM

    Windows 11 makes it possible to install APK, Google kills APK.

    Interesting coincidence.

  • by slownews45 on 7/2/21, 9:22 PM

    Going to have some meaningful size savings -> play store CDN traffic has got to be pretty incredible.

    I don't think devs were really creating enough APK's on the various device dimensions to do this efficiently themselves.

    They make it sound like you can't distribute your code using other platforms but you can (so far) based on what I've seen (using .apk)

    But smaller app sizes (and the other benefits) are not anti-consumer features.

  • by hypertele-Xii on 7/2/21, 7:03 PM

    I guess this is the last Google phone I ever buy then. I don't even sideload many apps, I just think it's immoral. To be fair to Google, it did erase "don't be evil" from its motto.

  • by andrewmcwatters on 7/2/21, 8:45 PM

    It's settled then. It's time for more phone Linux distros.

  • by GekkePrutser on 7/3/21, 12:29 AM

    This is not good. It means aurora store will probably break and it'll be necessary to log in with a Google account into the play store :(

    I install all my apps with aurora to cut down on data collected about me by Google. I don't log in with a Google account at all.

    For F-droid it's a lesser problem because they require open source software anyway and make reproducible builds to APK themselves. The problem is just that it's really hard to live with only F-droid apps :(

  • by kappuchino on 7/3/21, 7:00 PM

    Question: Will this also impact projects who test and observe behaviour of apps like the german https://mobilsicher.de/?

  • by ptrwis on 7/2/21, 9:52 PM

    I thought that maybe at least PWA apps could be bundled this way, but I can't find anything about it