Accrescent is a novel Android app store focused on security, privacy, and usability. We’ve been building Accrescent since 2021 to improve the security and freedom of everyday Android users by providing an alternative to Google Play which doesn’t compromise on technical excellence and protecting our users. Aligned with this mission, over 42,000 people worldwide trust Accrescent to deliver their apps safely. Now, we need your help to continue.
Accrescent has always been free to use because we believe security shouldn’t have to come at a price. We also understand we’re trusted by our users to secure a sensitive and significant portion of their lives — the apps they use — so we’ve built Accrescent transparently, making our code open source so others can run and inspect it as they please.
Personally, ever since I heard of this store, I’ve not been interested. It just seems like another Google Play to me.
I understand that the developers have done some things to enhance the security such as app certificate pinning and such, but I cannot get over the fact that it’s a single source that any government can contact and pull down an app from.
I personally stick with fdroid because if they are forced by governments to pull down an app the app dev can launch their own onion repo without asking permission.
And fdroid is working very diligently on reproducible builds. Which is unique in the app distribution landscape.
I understand the premise that you don’t want to trust a third party if you don’t have to. But I also don’t trust the developers to publish the source code correctly either. At least fdroid keeps everyone honest with the code being available.