Playmaker

Description & Features

Playmaker is a fdroid repository manager, which lets you download/update apps from the play store using your google account and configure repository with app you download. After you setup the server, repository will be available at the address http[s]://<playmaker_host>/fdroid, and you can start downloading apps from play store.

Server uses googleplay-api library, which is the python equivalent of the Java play-store-api library used by YalpStore.

Features:

Download apks from google play store to your collection
Generate a fdroid repository serving apks downloaded, directly from <pm_url>/fdroid
Configure automatic updates of app+repo through a Crontab string
Non-blocking UI, you can browse the collection or search for an app while the server is updating the fdroid repository.
Responsive UI, usable also from a mobile device

Configuration

Authentication

To avoid authentication problems, like captcha requests, it's recommended to setup app specific password, and securing your account with 2-factor auth. There are two ways to login to Play Store:

Providing credentials in a configuration file
Through a login page.

The default behaviour is to ask credentials with a login page, when accessing playmaker on first launch. In order to skip login page, it is possible to provide google credentials through a configuration file. Just put credentials.conf inside the playmaker directory, with this structure:

[google]
email = myemail@gmail.com
password = mypassword

To restrict access to that file, ensure it is readable only by user running playmaker.

HTTPS

It's recommended to configure playmaker with HTTPS, especially with the login page authentication, since playmaker needs to send to the server credentials in plaintext. You can setup it in conjunction with a proxy like nginx, or provide certificate directly to playmaker.

Running

Since this app requires a lot of heavy dependencies, like Android SDK and fdroidserver, it is recommended to use the docker image. You can use a pre-built image on docker hub or build by yourself using provided Dockerfile. There are some environment variables you'll want to use:

HTTPS_CERTFILE: path of the https certificate file
HTTPS_KEYFILE: path of the https key file
LANG_LOCALE: set a specific locale. Defaults to the system one if not set
LANG_TIMEZONE: set a specific timezone. Defaults to Europe/Berlin if not set
CRONTAB_STRING: crontab string to configure automatic updates. Defaults to every night at 2AM (0 2 * * *)
DEVICE_CODE: specify a device to be used by playmaker, defaults to bacon (OnePlus One) if not specified. For a list of supported devices see this file

To enable HTTPS through playmaker, without an external tool, just define HTTPS_CERTFILE and HTTPS_KEYFILE with paths to those file. If these variables are not set, tornado will default to http.

If you want to browse apps for a specific country, you need to specify the variables LANG_LOCALE and LANG_TIMEZONE. Before creating an issue "cannot find app X", make sure the app is available it that country.

The docker run command will look like this:

docker run -d --name playmaker \
    -p 5000:5000 \
    -v /srv/fdroid:/data/fdroid \
    -e HTTPS_CERTFILE="/srv/https.crt" \
    -e HTTPS_KEYFILE="/srv/https.key" \
    -e LANG_LOCALE="de_DE" \
    -e LANG_TIMEZONE="Europe/Berlin" \
    -e DEVICE_CODE="hammerhead" \
    fellek/playmaker:fellek

If you want to run it in a virtualenv rather than using docker, remember that you need to install fdroidserver, android SDK and define the ANDROID_HOME env variable (see the Dockerfile as a reference). Instruction on how to install fdroidserver here

Alternatives

YalpStore

YalpStore is an open source alternative to the play store. It works very well and it requires you to install only the app, but it requires one of the following thing to be able to install/update apks:

enable Unknown Sources
have root privileges

If you use playmaker and the fdroid privileged extension, fdroid will be able to install/update app without root privileges or enabling unknown sources.

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