I can currently run the beta on my CalyxOS Android phone, but have had problems with IAP style Android apps running as they don’t use the google phone home system to confirm the premium features.
I end up having to find an older version or alternative app if this is the case. I can buy the app in the app store and download from my account.
Will your paid version of Symfonik work with simple play store purchase so I can use it on my non stock Android phone?
The paid version is made via IAP sorry. But if you have Google Play it should work.
No, that’s the point, most custom ROMs don’t have Play Store to avoid Google from monitoring every aspect of their lives. The alternatives are FDroid (open source repo) and Aurora (play store clone). Aurora allows you to download apps anonymously, or get paid apps from you account. IAPs don’t work because the Google tracking guts have been removed from the phone.
Most users install gapps for the need to use paid apps, any app that do a licence check will fail.
From another app, there’s not enough need to justify the hassle of building a separate licence system that I’m not allowed to link anywhere to not get banned from Play Store.
If one day Google is forced to allow us to at least have visible purchase links on the application support pages then I’ll revisit, until then 0,1% of users is not worth a perma ban risk.
Fair enough, didn’t realise the work involved in the other options. Got to be a decent benefit/risk ratio for it to work.
Guess if anything, this has let you know that 0.1% (and growing) folks wishing to be outside the Google ecosystem are here!
I know there’s more and more people wanting that, but Google is without mercy with that. Just look after all the open source apps removed from Play Store for having a link to a donation button in their webpage that can be opened from a link in the app.
The situation is absurd, Google is a monopoly, but well there’s not much we can do about it.
Well, some of us are trying to escape it, but they don’t make it easy. Spent a few months doing it during pandemic, self hosted calendar/contacts, self hosted search engine (searx), hosted email, non Google android OS. Think maps is the only thing I still use regularly.
For what it’s worth, here is another user who would pay for an apk download outside of Google.
There’s quite a few posts that explains how I support that now via Ko-fi.
Sorry to bump an old thread, but one idea for how this could be handled in a more smooth way is via a custom f-droid repo, where buying the app via ko-fi or something gives you a username and password to access it? Fdroid repos can be username/password protected, but it seems like it could be automated somehow where you pay for access to the repo, which generates a unique username/password for you to access the repo. Might be a lot of work so no worries if you don’t want to do that, but I’d definitely appreciate it!
Or even a custom fdroid repo that’s unprotected but provides symfonium without google libraries and only has the alternative licensing method for people who’ve paid via kofi?