From what I was reading recently, NeoStore is also the F-Droid client which supports automatic upgrades on Android 12, without root.

The lack of automatic updates/upgrades in F-Droid is what keeps putting me off. I completely understand people who want more control over when and which apps get the updates, but this is not a good policy for the general case: I trust the developers of the apps I install from F-Droid to provide me with security, stability and performance updates much more than I distrust them to pull the rug from under my feet.

I also don't think an alternative-to-the-alternative is the right solution. I didn't even know NeoStore or Aurora existed before now, and frankly I don't want to know the difference. F-Droid is already extremely niche, compared to the Play Store. It needs to play every strong card it has available at hand, rather than proliferate the fracturing.

iudqnolq

That's an Android restriction, you need root to allow non-play-services to install apps.

rollcat

Oh.

I haven't rooted an Android device since 2014.

I just did some lazy research for the version of LineageOS I'm using. Am I missing something, or is it normal to find the procedure confusing and somewhat scary? There is github.com/LineageOS/Superuser and github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk, it seems I need to build Superuser from source (yikes); Magisk from F-Droid wants to install a newer version from Github (but that doesn't work); the version that works wants to patch a ROM file, which I don't know where to get from... The app lists changelogs rather than instructions.

I understand it's partly the fault of Android's security architecture, but I wish it was actually manageable for normal people.

onli

This seems to be partly a Lineage problem - with probably some Android culpability mixed in. Lineage had their own very simple to install superuser addon, but that was dropped a few versions ago. Some Android changes prompted this, but probably also their attitude against rocking the boat (no rooting, no signature spoofing, etc).

The remaining solution was Magisk. Magisk was equally easy to install, but recently deprecated that easy install method so that only patching the ROM file remains (you get that file from the ROM you run, unpack the archive, if you are unlucky you need to unpack a second payload.bin file, https://wiki.lineageos.org/extracting_blobs_from_zips#extrac...). But not only is that more complicated, it also does not persist after a Lineage upgrade, which happens every week, see https://github.com/topjohnwu/Magisk/issues/3820#issuecomment.... Totally crazy for a project not in early alpha.

I want root to properly manage my battery via https://github.com/VR-25/acc ( with ideally https://github.com/MatteCarra/AccA as Magisk module). How ridiculously complicated that is now and that the install procedure is broken without them documenting it soured me quite a bit on Magisk, but I also start to develop some bad feelings about Lineage - because it is them that would be in the best position to provide a simple root solution. But they just refuse it, and even forbid discussing such topics on their subreddit - that alone shows me that the project is very user hostile currently. I doubt with that attitude they can make a turnaround, but I'd be happy to be wrong...

Sadly the other bigger ROMs are to my knowledge not better in this category, neither /e/ with their service suite, nor DivestOS with the passionate developer nor CalyxOS or GrapheneOS with their "security" focus are interested in giving the user full access to their device. Android seems to be a dead end here, real Linux is needed.