For many years, the ease of extracting and sharing APK files (used to install apps) has been a benefit to the Android ecosystem. For example, if a recent app update is causing serious problems, you can go to a crowdsourcing website to download an older version from there until the issue is resolved. Or, if the amount of data is limited, you can ask someone locally to send the APK file of the game or app update for installation.
But not all companies are enthusiastic about the ability to copy and install APK files from third-party sources. So, the message came that Xiaomi has already created an open source Android project that prohibits device owners from copying APK files from third-party sources. The reason is “to protect private resources”.
Xiaomi wants apps to be available only on the Google Play Store or other trusted marketplace. Unexpectedly, Google opposed the company’s initiative. But not because of competition and freedom of sources to get content. The problem is that the software prepared by Xiaomi has a significant drawback. It is designed to block the extraction of APK files only from the regular (custom) build of Android. According to one of the employees of Google, in order to get around this limitation, it will be enough to install a debug build of the green robot and this will allow you to extract the APK in the usual way. Those. in fact, he says that the Xiaomi lock is not an effective and efficient tool.
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Google is sure that there is no effective way to block extracting APK files
In addition, a number of Google developers believe that APK files cannot be “private”. A possessed APK cannot be expected to be kept secret. They are sure that even if they would like to do this, they cannot guarantee that any of the methods will actually work.
Google has recently published statistics on the distribution of Android versions in the Android Studio section.
Due to the peculiarities of the data, Android 12 is not available in the statistics. We also do not know the share of Android 11 also; since the indicated 28.3% is occupied by Android 11 and newer versions, that is, Android 12 and 12L. In any case, it is these systems that jointly occupy the largest share. Android 10 takes 23.9%. It is quite possible that Android 10 remains the most common version so far; since Samsung is actively updating its devices to Android 12, and the share of Android 11 may be less than 23.9%.
Android 9 has 16.2%, Oreo has 11.6%, Nougat has only 5%, Android 6 has 3.9%; while Lollipop, KitKat and Jelly Bean account for 3%, 1% and 0 respectively. 4%.
