Currently, you are unable to view the APKMirror web page. Instead, you get the following message shown in the screenshot below.
Tiktok downloads are currently blocked in the United States due to the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
The link in this statement leads to the following page, containing the bill that was passed:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521
This sets a dangerous precedent going forward for the Android community which sideloads applications onto their phones, being that APKMirror is the largest mirror of APKs for Android phones. It’s also possible for them to add more apps to be included under this bill, and possible for another bill to be passed which may act as an even more broad blanket to target specific groups of people (e.g. LGBTQ+, people of color), messaging applications that are truly secure (e.g. Signal), and so on.
Then of course there a very real possibility of our president forcing the integration of software updates into both Android (and possibly even iOS smartphones) that can forcibly remove applications for the “sake of national security”.
Blocked APKMirror links:
Man… I miss the old internet where we just didn’t follow the rules.
Wait, we were supposed to be following rules?
Ad tech and surveillance capitalism keeps this spirt alive.
no! I didn’t mean it like that!
That’s a cloudflare page. I don’t think apkmirror is doing it.
Could just be apkmirror setting up the block themselves in their Cloudflare dash. Might be the easiest way for them to do a geofence type thing.
I thought it looked like CloudFlare. Does that mean the US government is leveraging Cloudflare in order to block whatever they choose, assuming it has that as its underlying architecture?
In that cloudflare is following the law, yes.
Or Cloudflare is on their knees drinking orange juice for a more favorable seat at the table. Iirc they’re responsible for ~20% of web traffic, so it’s certainly something to keep an eye on.
Sounds like people need to start divesting from America and hosting their content in the free world not Trumps snowflake censorship kingdom.
That’s a CloudFlare page. CloudFlare is responsible for something like 25% of the entire world’s internet traffic. Even if they aren’t hosting it, they’re still dealing with routing. Self-hosting in another country won’t help if your traffic still bounces off of a CloudFlare server.
This is similar to the situation that started the Itch.io and FunkoPop feud. Itch.io was hosting a game that FunkoPop believed infringed on their trademark. Instead of just submitting a request to take the game down, Funko went above Itch’s head and got the entire site blocked. Itch.io didn’t even know anything was wrong until their site was suddenly inaccessible. And it was inaccessible even though their servers were perfectly fine, because the systems used to access their servers had been the ones to actually block the site.
Yes, this is just another policy that hinders the working class, the duopoly does like their police state.
Anyone have any thoughts on APKPure as an alternative?
APKPure
It looks a little sketchy to me, I’m seeing mixed things on reddit about it.
An alternative application you can use to download Google Play apps is the Aurora Store (https://gitlab.com/AuroraOSS/AuroraStore), but I think it still obtains the files from Google Play.
Damn, Aurora is linked to google and you need to login to get apks, unlike F-Droid.
Aurora Store enables you to search and download apps from the official Google Play store. You can check app descriptions, screenshots, updates, reviews, and download the APK directly from Google Play to your device. To use Aurora Store, you need to have a Google Play account, and log in to your Google Play account when you first open and configure Aurora Store.
(Alternatively Aurora Store also allow you to login anonymously)
Unlike a traditional app store, Aurora Store does not own, license or distribute any apps. All the apps, app descriptions, screenshots and other content in Aurora Store are directly accessed, downloaded and/or displayed from Google Play.
Aurora Store works exactly like a door or a browser, allowing you to log in to your Google Play account and find the apps from Google Play.
Please note that Aurora Store does not have any approval, sponsorship or authorization from Google, Google Play, any apps downloaded through Aurora Store or any app developers; neither does Aurora Store have any affiliation, cooperation or connection with them.
F-Droid is cool, but limited with apks.
F-Droid is an installable catalogue of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. The client makes it easy to browse, install, and keep track of updates on your device.
You can just login anonymously like the description you posted says. It works pretty well. It’s how I download apps that aren’t available on my local play store.
And how I get ones that it says are incompatible with my device for no apparent reason.
F-Droid is great, but it’s only for FOSS. So it won’t host content like TikTok on it.
