Place to download mainstream apps other than Google Play?

[Spratz]

I had to change country on my phone to download important apps to use in the country I was living in for a couple of months.

I'm back home now but Google won't let me change back to my original country for a year!

I have important apps to download and use but Google Play states they're not available in my country, which of course is the country I was in.

I think this is absolutely nuts and I'm assuming there was a way to avoid this while downloading the needed apps but it's too late now.

I'm also assuming there's no way around this with Google, other than maybe registering everything under a new Gmail account.

Therefore, is there a website where I can download well known apps without using Google Play?

For example, I'm in the UK and I need to download the EasyJet app.

Thanks very much and hope you can help.

 

[nickdalzell]

there is the Aptoide store that tries hard to sort of mimic the Android Market that once was the de-facto store

then there are sites such as apkmirror.com and apkpure.com for straight app packages, requiring you to enable 'unknown sources' in security settings to install them. they download as 'apk' files which you open a file browser and tap the file and it should then install as normal. that method is my own preference since there is no app store to sneak in unwanted updates/UI redesigns, and no account needed

 

[Dannydet]

Apkmirror.com
Apkpure.com

 

[kate]

Amazon also has an Android app store.

f-droid.org is an open source app store, but they don't have EasyJet.

 

[nickdalzell]

the last time I used Amazon appstore was on the Galaxy S4. every apk of it since either dies 'app not installed' or complains about not working afterwards, or crashes infinite loop style 'amazon appstore keeps stopping'

I figured they EOL'd it on anything other than Amazon Fire devices. But I don't like app stores anyway so it doesn't really affect me. I was tired of not being able to use any version of an app instead of the latest version, and the app store having the ability to sneak in updates even if I turned said features off. With APK sideloading, any app stays as it is unless I specifically sideload an updated APK version.

F-Droid ain't for the faint-hearted. You need to add in repos for it to do anything similar to Linux. It's just easier for me to search duckduckgo for whatever.apk and find it easy. I don't do the 'sudo apt-get' crap either, I use Linux and still download sources or tarballs.

If I were into app stores, there's the SlideMe marketplace, which hasn't been updated since Android 2.3, so every app it offers is from that era or below. It does download every app as an apk so backing them up is easy, and great for those few of us who prefered Android in that era over the iOS clone it is today.