Is anyone going to mention getting you *may* (remote chance) have your google account blacklisted by using this? Same as the app from which its derived and all other fake stores...
Should be in the OP as a disclaimer....irresponsible to not make people aware of this
I absolutely disagree. Using third-party client to access Play Store
IS NOT forbidden via Google TOS thus it cannot be a reason of terminating the contract by Google basing on the pt. 8.3 TOS.
I am aware that yeriomin (the creator of YalpStore) states otherwise in the readme at yalp's github or even in in-app warnings, but I guess the reason he does so is that he's much better programmer than lawyer... And even until now this is being repeated and repeated - but NO ONE took an effort to verify that thesis.
yeriomin indicates that Yalp violates pt. 3.3 of Play Services TOS - available at
https://www.google.com/mobile/android/market-tos.html - which in result *may* lead to banning an account (see pt. 8.3). But that pt. 3.3 says:
3.3 You agree not to access (or attempt to access) Google Play by any means other than through the interface that is provided by Google, unless you have been specifically allowed to do so in a separate agreement with Google. You specifically agree not to access (or attempt to access) Google Play through any automated means (including use of scripts, crawlers, or similar technologies) and shall ensure that you comply with the instructions set out in any robots.txt file present on the Google Play website.
The facts:
1) So, does Yalp access the store via "the interface that is provided by Google". Let me quote the developer ("How it works" at github): "Yalp Store uses the same (protobuf) API [application programming interface] the android Play Store app uses". Yes, YALP's requesting Play Store content by utilizing exactly the same genuine Google Play set of commands as original Play Store, thus it is true that
Google Play is being accessed by interface provided by Google. Period. AFAIK it does not communicate with Play Store by any other means, for example via requests to third party proxy server illegally caching Play Store content or by utilizing http protocol and parsing the response html or any other non-official techniques. The main difference between original Store and Yalp is the way of presenting the data to the user, but
the only decisive factor, i.e. accessing the Google Play, is being performed via the very same Google interface. Please also note that even if Yalp uses some undocumented requests, obtained via reverse-engineering (I don't know if it does), it still doesn't violate 3.3 - the
only condition the interface has to met is that it has to be "provided by Google". Hidden API, even if undocumented and never announced to the public, is still an interface "provided by Google". I'd rather say that in purpose, this clause was aimed at the ones who are trying to exploit Google Play by issuing somewhat broken API requests looking for some unhandled situations etc.
2) Does yalp access the store via "any automated means" (like scripts or crawlers)? Just run the app once and it'll be obvious that Yalp does perform it's communication with Google Play in result of the decisions made by the user. Yalp has to be operated manually. Yalp does not offer any automation features like queueing the instalation of a lot of apps or pre-buffering any data except the one which is needed to serve the user's request.
No, it definitely does not break this clause either. Let me explain that the "robots.txt" part is about the crawlers which are avoiding the fact that they are blacklisted in Google's robots.txt standard configuration file by acting that they are other crawlers. In fact this whole fragmen is mainly aimed at accounts used by some third parties to index huge amount of Play store resources via automated http crawlers, and the data is then used to - for example - provide a fake app store which steals credit card data etc.
This condition is not related to YalpStore in any way.
Let's sum up. As you can see, using any third party client DOES NOT violate 3.3 of Google TOS in any aspect - until it does not perform any malicious or forbidden connection attempts or until it does not automatically mine for Play Store resources.
Therefore, there should be no worries to use YalpStore with your daily-driver account.
