DeGoogle Yourself

I haven't seen the rate limitation issue for a couple of months now. The issue is not new, IIRC the Aurora team needs to provide more and more anonymous accounts as the user base is growing. Some months ago we had this problem for more than two weeks. I just checked and Aurora finds no connection, but until today everything worked flawlessly. And I expect it to work again soon.

I feel your pain though. I am degoogled for more than 5 years now and what I learned is that Google will always look for ways to make our life harder. More and more basic functions such as network location were seperated from the AOSP into proprietary google services. I am pretty sure this will get even worse in the future.

We must not forget that we rely on open source software and a hand full if developers, everything can break tomorrow and we are fucked.

you guys are aware the new play integrity API will demand us to have both the official play store AND a locked bootloader to use any app that wants to enforce it right?

they are definetly coming for us.

I only use apps from fdroid . But yeah i guess it sucks if you need banking apps

I would recommend using apkupdater for closed source apks, in particular enabling apkpure repo, rather than insisting on using google repo with aurora store or any other mechanism.

Also looking for FLOSS alternatives if possile (granted things like whatsapp and waze won't have alternatives for example).

Some metioned apkmirror as the more trusted repo for closed source apps, however it's currently formatting apks on multiple apks, and supposedly requesting for the apkmirror own instaler, so I recommend apkpure instead, which is also pretty well regarded, and they also in theory offer the same packages as the ones on google play...

For FLOSS apps, the different f-droid repos (official ones and non official ones such as izzy-on-droid) offer a good amount of them.

Really seems to me that the only way to manage this consistently will be with a non-de-googled phone as back-up for downloading and exporting apks. Doesn't need a phone number, and wouldn't have to have a google account with any real information.

This isn't the first time Google plays at making non-normies' lives difficult.

I agree with the tone of this, but are you seriously using "normies" unironically?

Yeah everything is broken with anti-patterns meant to kill competition.

I keep a separate Google Chrome install with no addons for government and banking. Websites break things so badly unless you're leaving yourself wide open to all their privacy snooping and what not.

For random web browsing the annoyances don't matter as much. It's unacceptable when it comes to important things. It's all by (anti-)design.

Another solution would be downloading the APK from APKMirror. I believe all their APKs signatures are checked against the proper Play Store releases or something like that (don't quote me on that), but the baseline is that all their APKs should be pretty safe.

RCS just got cut for me again today because I'm rooted. At this point I'm spiteful enough that anybody who wants to reach me is going to have to do it through signal.

I just switched to a degoogled phone and Aurora recently, and it worked fine installing 30+ apps. When you get an error, try logging out of Aurora and start a new session, maybe the current Aurora proxy your phone is using is down

I banged my head against this for a while, turned out switching VPN servers did the trick for me. Might help for you? Could also try installing an update for aurora. Or you could try deleting all aurora data. Those have helped in the past as well.

For banking exclusively, I use an insecure old phone with all the Google stuff updated through the Play Store. This phone is only on, without a SIM, behind a VPN, when I make a transaction. Battery lasts forever.

And yeah, Google don't like people who won't allow them to fuck around with Android phones.

I've been running GraphiteOS and get most of my apps from Fdroid.

I noticed I only got the rate limiting error when searching for an app on Aurora, but not to download and install. But how to get to the install page if you can't search?

I opened Firefox/Fennec on mobile, searched for an app, clicked the result for the Google Play store. Once on the play store page for the app was open, I would choose the "Open in App" option from the Firefox menu and select Aurora.

That would launch Aurora and bring me directly to the App Install page. From there I could complete the installation.

This was sometime in 2023, but hopefully it will still be helpful today.

It makes me nauseous to say this, but I am now considering getting a goddamned iPhone just to avoid Google, trading one shitcorp for another shitcorp.

What other options are there to be de-Googled and avoid the app troubles OP is battling?

It works for me! Just try loging out (via the settings) and back in...

my only hope is that with the receding influence of us tech companies we will get more breathing space for alternative foss software in the future.