[deleted] if you don't like aurora I don't know what you like obtanium,
Huh? I never said anything of the sort? Don't know where you got this idea that I "don't like Aurora"·
that is in fact the same: an app in the middle of you and the app you want.
... except that's not at all what I meant by middlemen?? I'm talking about how Obtainium allows direct APK installs from the developers themselves, as opposed to installing through the Play Store like you would with Aurora. Hence the middleman would be the Play Store whereas Obtainium doesn't really have a middleman.
Even if we were to treat the Obtainium app itself as a middleman, its open source (with a solid reputation) so I trust its ability to install APKs directly (without a middleman). Obtainium is, in my opinion, a better choice than Aurora since being open source only benefits Aurora itself and doesn't really help or protect users from the Play Store that Aurora ultimately relies on.
The only instance that I, personally, can recommend to use Aurora is when users want/need to install apps from Play Store specifically (e.g. closed source apps like Discord, Spotify, etc.) but they don't want to use all of the Google Services on their phone.
If you use Aurora to update your existing apps you may be sure the apps are over control, due can't be installed if signatures differs.
To my knowledge, the developer's keys are handled by Google themselves. But I might be wrong. If I'm not wrong, then no thanks. I'd rather stick to the keys being firmly in the hands of the developers, personally.