My wife and I went all out for our first born and as a baby monitor we got a MIKU. It is able to track the baby's breathing without any accessories and one of the key reasons I chose MIKU was that even though it was expensive it did not have a subscription model. BECAUSE I FUCKING HATE SUBSCRIPTIONS. Fast forward to Summer of 2023 and MIKU went bankrupt. The company that bought them tried to salvage it by including a $10/month subscription for everything except for the main camera function (which they cannot legally remove). And the way they tried to enforce it is by pushing an app update that blocks said features. I just went on APK Mirror and downloaded the previous version and turned off auto updates. And everything works perfectly. Thank you android and thank you APK Mirror.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 9 months ago (7 children)

I wish android natively has a roll back option to un-update apps... But that would be too user-friendly, I suppose.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (4 children)

Android doesn't allow you to install an older version of an app over a new version. F-Droid has the UI for it but it doesn't work, the security policy prevents the install.

There's probably a good reasons for that, but I can't think of it other than the flawed reasoning of "it can't be a good idea to roll back an update". I'm sure even Google can imagine a situation where, say, an app update got infected with malware or something like that and it's in everyone's best interest to roll back to the previous version until a clean update arrives. Preventing rollback means the only way to do that is for the user to manually uninstall the app and reinstall the desired version.

Okay, I can think of a possible reason for that policy: it prevents malware from downgrading a target app to a former (official, signed) version which can be exploited. I don't know how realistic this scenario is, though.

[–] herrvogel 5 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You don't need to implement support for rollbacks to handle those "emergency" rollbacks. You could just push a "new" version that's actually the last known good version, and the phone would happily install it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

You can only do this if you have the signing keys. If the store wants to do this for users (say, if the developer is incapacitated somehow) they can't.

Edit: I'm actually not 100% sure if the signing keys are required for changing just the version number, but I assume so

[–] herrvogel 3 points 9 months ago

That sounds about right for Google play. That said, the point still stands. If Google wanted to implement such a feature, it could probably be done by onky patching things on their store backend. I'm sure it wouldn't be a trivial change, but still it wouldn't need to touch the OS itself. Probably. As far as the phone is concerned, it would still be disallowing rollbacks as usual.

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