I gave Aptoide a chance in 2024. It was an unexpected and pleasant surprise.

Years later I returned to Aptoide. Everything is not as I remembered

When we talk about Aptoide, we are talking about one of the innovative app stores that offers an alternative to the Play store. Throughout its history, it has not been free from controversy, as the security section always raises doubts that fall on this type of store. In fact, it had to win a battle with the Play Store because Play Protect wanted to prevent this app from being installed on Android devices.

Despite the controversy, over time, Aptoide has managed to become one of the largest Android stores in the world, second only to the Play store itself.

In my particular case, I hadn’t tried Aptoide in almost 5 or 6 years and wanted to go back to the app to check its current status. I can already say that it was a pleasant surprise.

Aptoide has evolved in a very satisfying manner.

The first thing that catches your eye about the latest version of Aptoide is the interface, it is quite well thought out and this is one of the details that third-party app stores tend to neglect. Third-party stores are usually visually very different from traditional app stores, which can be a bit of a hassle when we first visit them.

This is not the case with Aptoide, an application in which we will find a completely updated interface, divided into different categories and, most importantly, very intuitive. If you’re wondering if the most popular apps are available on AptoideThe answer is resounding: yes, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube and even the main Spanish banking applications are in this repository.

The only place where I found some lack of repertoire was in games. Yes, there are some of the most popular and downloaded deliveries from the Play Store. But here the volume of games is not as extensive as in the applications section. I really liked it How to download everything: the same as in the Play Store. You select the app and it downloads, no need to go to an external portal.

The highlight of the store is related to the version of the applications themselves. First of all, I noticed that the latest version is always availableone that often takes a while to hit the Play Store as the update has not yet been released through the server in our region.

In case of Aptoide, we will always update to the latest version without any wait. And if we are not convinced by the latest version we just downloaded, we can go back to the previous version

from the app itself, a feature that I would like to have in the Google Play store itself, and which is not available for security reasons.

Another rather interesting section is that Aptoide dedicates an exclusive section of its store so that the developers themselves have a place. That is, we can access the list of favorite developers and immediately see all the applications they have published. This is something relatively similar to the developer file that we find in the Play Store, but with a special section that makes it more visible to developers.

As for the question you might be asking yourself, is Aptoide safe or not. The answer is that, generally speaking, Yes it. Once you download an Aptoide app, it goes through a security check using appropriate anti-malware systems.

In fact, Aptoide displays a verification badge on those apps that have passed all the relevant security checks and are guaranteed to download. In cases where we do not see the icon, we will know that this application is pending review, so it is up to us to decide whether to download it or not.

Is Aptoide a threat to the Play Store? No. It’s not… and doesn’t pretend to be.. It’s a fairly secure alternative that allows developers to avoid Google’s fee systems and has the important advantage that updates are delivered fairly quickly since it’s a more direct APK repository.

Aptoide plans to launch on iOS, and the store’s future looks more than promising with important agreements with manufacturers like Mercedes to bring the app into future cars.

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