I haven’t been able to update my cellphone anonymously with Aurora since January. Every time I try, Aurora errors out with “Oops, you are rate limited”.
This isn’t the first time Google plays at making non-normies’ lives difficult. So I tried the usual tricks, updated Aurora, tried the nightly build, waited, tried again… for months - to no avail: Google just won’t play ball this time.
Last week, Signal stopped working and demanded to be updated. Fortunately, Signal offers the APK as a normal download without having to get it from the hateful Google Play store.
Today, my home banking identificator app did the same thing and stopped working. I needed to make a payment right now, and I had no way to update the app: “Oops, you are rate limited”. And my bank sure doesn’t offer the APK outside of anything but the goddamn Google Play store.
So I relented and created a Google account. Which of course entailed giving Google a phone number. I sure didn’t give them mine, so I phoned a friend abroad who doesn’t care to ask him to receive the verification SMS on his phone and read out the code to me. Which worked long enough to set up 2FA and do away with phone numbers altogether. And finally, after an hour of fucking around, annoying other people and compromising their phone number, I could update my banking app and make my payment at last.
All that because Google has decided they want to control my phone.
Fuck Google.
Seriously, how they are allowed to hold the Android world hostage like this without getting their monopolistic ass Sherman’ed AT&T-style, I’ll never know. It’s long overdue.
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.
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?
I’ve been using GrapheneOS on Pixel 7 for about 5 months now, and haven’t seen any issues. With this, bootloader is also locked, so no issues there.
I’ve been eyeing the Murena Fairphone 4 and I think I may go that route. Their OS is purpose built to de-Google, offering free competing services while still having access to the Play store. It seems like it might be a good way to do this for someone like me who doesn’t know what a bootloader is or why it should be locked.
with fairphone, I am afraid of inferior build quality. Reviews tell they got old hardware and stuff. But will prolly get fairphone once I get some extra money :D
I’ve been using the Fairphone 4 for a few weeks now. The hardware is excellent in every way. I am coming from the most recent LG ThinQ which has higher specs than the Fairphone 4 on paper, but the Fairphone actually feels better to use. It’s much better than I expected.
