> Android users can easily install Firefox (or better yet, Firefox Nightly) through the Google Play store
Not every Android device has access to Google Play, yet Mozilla still doesn't provide an APK download for Firefox from its website to make sure those users can have their browser too, despite all of this complaining.
This is actually another example of where OSes get in the way of browser freedom. Because of Google Play Services and its dependency on phones that have Google Play Store, it may be more difficult to support multiple builds of the app than it should be. Still, this is a good point, would love to see Mozilla support non-GMS Android devices.
> Still, this is a good point, would love to see Mozilla support non-GMS Android devices
Well, actually, they "support" non-GMS Android devices in the sense that no Google services are required to run Firefox on Android. But you have to get the APK from unofficial sites like APKpure or APKmirror (trusting you're downloading a non-tampered file) or finding the appropriate build among all the releases in Github.
Perhaps the complaint is that they are not releasing to competing stores like Amazon? I would find it hard to believe that legit Firefox builds are not already on Fdroid
It's not the same as clicking on a direct APK download link as WhatsApp does on their website. You download and install, that's it. Here, first get into Github, browse between beta releases, OK, is this one? Now, should I get arm64 or armeabi? Definitely not a simple process, and of course not suitable at all for non technical users.
I wish they'd set up an F-Droid repo so you don't need to follow Github links to download Firefox. F-Droid is the de-facto open source app store for Android, after all. Bromite, a privacy-focused Chrome replacement, has an F-Droid repo, and that's run by a single guy as far as I can tell, so surely Mozilla can do the same.
Right now only Fennec is on F-Droid (which has some changes that give you more user freedom than the default browser build…) but Firefox is nowhere to be found. Their build process is incompatible with the official repo but that doesn't mean they can't set up their own repo instead.
Not every Android device has access to Google Play, yet Mozilla still doesn't provide an APK download for Firefox from its website to make sure those users can have their browser too, despite all of this complaining.