Hi there,
I would like to start this post with a premise: I know that dating apps go against the general spirit of GOS, and I was not trying to personally install one, so please spare this kind of comments (I say this because I saw a lot of them in other posts).
Here's what happened: a friend of mine was telling me about a weird Italian meme dating app, so out of curiosity I wanted to see if it was real. Since I know that dating apps do not show up in Aurora Store, I went to the Google Play Store installed from the OS directly (that I have to use for two banking apps that otherwise do not start). After looking for the app in the Play Store, I was met with a message saying "Looking for [appname]? This app isn't available". Since this is, as I said, a weird niche app, I thought that maybe it was broken, had been removed from the Play store or was not available in my country. However, at that point, I wanted to look into the matter, so I looked for other dating apps.
Moral of the story: every single dating app gives the same message (mainstream dating apps, LGBT dating apps, Christian dating apps...) - "Looking for [appname]? This app isn't available". This is pretty weird to me, when you consider the following:
-OS up to date, Pixel 6a, Alpha channel
-on main user profile
-Google play services, GmsCompatConfig, Google Services Framework and Google Play store all installed from the "Apps" app since day 1. All up to date.
-no other apps showing up as unavailable in the official play store, even banking ones show up and work fine
-no VPN active
-location settings left as default
-I'm in the EU, so it's not like those apps are blocked for political/religious reasons
-I logged into the google play store with a "real" google account (one I personally made and own, not a shared one like those in Aurora Store)
I tried clearing the Play Store cache/data and rebooting the phone as some official google forum posts suggested, but no change.
This is the first time that I find a whole category of apps completely unavailable in GOS even when going through the official play store with play services and GSF installed.
Is this expected behavior?
I know, as I said, that dating apps are not very in the spirit of the OS, but 1) some people still might want to use them and 2) to my understanding, the goal of the OS is to have a potential experience that is a close as possible to the stock one, when you are ok with installing the google package from "Apps".
At the same time, if this is something on my end only, I would like to have your input on what it might be that's causing this, because I already did everything I could think of.
Here's a screenshot of the message I get for every dating app: https://imgur.com/a/6jzUrMN
Thanks