Graphene Os App Stores Comparision

Graphene OS, the secure Android without Google (the system on a phone you should use …, its by far the best mobile os out there), ships by default its own Graphene OS App Store. In there aren’t many apps, basically only the GrapheneOS Apps, some google play shit, for the poor people who need it for compatability and Accrescent.

Since this app store is preinstalled and required for sys app updates, I’m gonna exclude it. Also like you can see above, its not intended for normal apps.

Accrescent is a private and secure Android app store built with modern features in mind. It aims to provide a developer-friendly platform and pleasant user experience while enforcing modern security and privacy practices and offering robust validity guarantees for installed apps.

this is how Accrescent describes itself. Well and Ig they really have a bunch of cool security features (see their features page). But I have one big issue, which some people might see as a boon, but I don’t. They have a central app repository, not allowing 3rd party app repos. And thats for security reasons, well I get that, if you have only one small catalogue of apps, its easier to enforce high quality standards … But the whole store becomes easy to target for regulations etc. like lets say a gov decided to ban vpn’s, to avoid legal consequences, Accerescent might comply.

So if you want to use Accrescent (I use it myself for a few apps), you can do so, and it’s pretty solid, but I recommend you also keep a second store which doesnt follow this central approach.

Also note that the app catalogue is pretty limited, like overall ig less than 30 apps (or maybe slightly over), but don’t expect to find everything you want there …

The Aurora Store is basically a different front-end for the google play store, one where you don’t require a google account. This is pretty useful if you need a particular app that is only in googles store (mostly some proprietary slop apps). And yep I get that you might need some e.g. for banking.

So my recommendation here is: make yourself a second user profile on your graphene os phone, and in there install the aurora store. Then use it to install your banking and other proprietary apps that you really need. I prefer setting the profile also so that it can’t run in the background, this improves also the security of it, since this profile is basically always in the before first unlock state when you switch to your every-day profile back, additionally it prevents these proprietary apps from being too noise, as they only run a short amount of time (in my case mostly like ig, a few min once / week …).

I also heard that in countries where some apps are geo blocked, you might be able to get them from the Aurora Store, like in china etc.

But overall I recommend you use anyway FOSS Apps as much as possible, they are available basically everywhere in the world (at most their networking is blocked, but the code is basically impossible to be blocked). I might write for this also a small write-up in the future, with my favorite foss apps that do everything I need for my everyday life.

This is probably the most popular store for free software, every app in here is open source, this store is by far more secure than the google play store and you can basically find apps for everything …

I recommend this to people who just want a working app store without searching sources in the internet.

Also there can be 3rd-party F Droid repos, which makes it decentral, earning from me a big +. And their v2.0 redesign also looks pretty cool

Now to the one store I use myself the most, Obtainum lets you basically just link the release pages of apks and then pull from there the newest ones regularly. Like lets say you have an app that is on github and publishs its apks under each release. Then just point Obtainium there and it will always get you the newest version of the app.

Or even better an app that is on codeberg or a private forgejo instance, also easy to get. You can also give it an f-droid store link and it’ll pull it from there. Or just a plain website to pull the apk from there. That is useful for e.g. the Proton Calendar app … kinda sad that they can’t manage to publish their builds on github (where their code lives) …

Anyway Obtainium is great since it supports tons of sources and lets you even define custom search regex to find the download link on a website …

Use Obtainium if you want to be the most in control and don’t mind searching for builds yourself on github etc. If you want it easier then use F-Droid.

Google is currently about to roll out that every app developer needs to verify themselves in their portal with government issued id (basically total surveillance and control), like apple is already doing. After this you need to go through some really annoying procedues to get unverified apps running on your phone (a ton of foss apps won’t be verified). On Graphene OS you won’t have this problem, so I recommend anyone of you who’s still on stock android to switch and tell your friends etc. too to switch. GOS is anyway the far superior OS, giving you way more control …