The title rhymes!

If you’re begrudgingly using Aurora Store because you need it for whatever reason, there’s a small thing you might want to be aware of to increase your privacy.

When selecting anonymous account, you’re still sending some metadata to Google. As F-Droid warns on the Aurora Store page:

By default, the apps list and system details are sent to Google Play servers, which is likely enough data to fingerprint the device.

In other words - here be dragons.

If you’re gonna do it though, along with the obvious precautions, you can use Tor strictly for the connection to Aurora Store. Here’s how: download Orbot, go to orbot settings, general, enable power user mode. Go back to the main menu and note the Socks Port number (default 9050), click connect. Go into Aurora Store, settings, networking, click on proxy Url and enter

socks://127.0.0.1:9050

or whatever your socks port was. You can also type localhost rather than that IP most of the time (but I’ve seen the app bug out randomly).

Now you’re connected through Tor without having it on system wide.

You’re still giving valuable data to Google, but at least you’re mixing yourself in with the pool of Tor users. Whether this can truly stop Google, who knows.

VPN is basically always blocked so if you’re also using that, you’ll need to enable split tunneling for Aurora Store (note this is technically a privacy risk).

Even still, Google will block Tor from time to time. You can play around with Orbot a bit to try making it less common, but Aurora Store is buggy at the best of times.

But I know people will use it anyways, so you might as well make things a bit more private. When possible, use Obtanium or F-Droid instead. F-Droid has built in Tor as well. There’s probably a bunch of other stuff you can do, but this was the least documented bit I came across personally.