Over time this is going to stiffle innovation big time.
I love that little app. It's so dang useful to be able to wirelessly copy files from my pc to my phone and vice versa. I previously tried a sftp client on android (terminus?) to no avail.
Edit: I installed via the play store, I see many folks have installed it via fdroid but I'm not sure why.
Because https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19429193 (KDE Connect removed from Google Play store for violating new policy on SMS).
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/176bk9b/goog...
Wow, I didn't know play 'protect' could do that.
Same is true for Apple.
(With one marrow exclusion for those who installed a "de-googled" Android variant and run no Google services.)
The only way to fly!
It's a never ending battle to access Play store apps with Google regularly breaking Aurora Store Nightly, but some of us manage.
The good thing about MicroG is that you can replace some Google stuff with better ones like a local location DB. It's also much lighter because it doesn't spend 90% of its processing time trying to spy on you. Its code is actually written to do stuff on your behalf as the user, not Google's.
Sandboxing real Google Play does stop it from being able to do some of the spying but not all, and it doesn't stop it from trying and wasting battery power.
The only thing I really need from Google is the push messaging because most app services simply don't integrate with anything else :(
There is no way to permanently tell it that an app is not in fact malicous and it will keep asking you to remove it.
KDE Connect commands can also be triggered from Tasker, so with Autowear I can trigger commands from my watch
I installed with the usual Play store, link seems to show mostly (all?) affected were f-droid users