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How To Download Android APK Files Officially From Google Play Store

Posted on the 03 November 2013 by Tftb @TFTB

The Android fragmentation scene is pretty bad. Most of the items it doesn’t much affect the end-user if they are happy with the apps they use are available for their device. But when you switch to a new device or start using your old device things might get messy. For an Android tablet or a smartphone owner, it is very annoying to see when an app is either not compatible for their device or the Google Play Store simply won’t allow your device to download certain app you desperately need.

With Android penetration of more than 40% share of the Mobile OS, there is bound to be millions of users who suffer this problem. And APK Downloader is just the tool made for it.

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APK Downloader, as it says downloads the APK file ( Android App installation file ) directly from the Google Play Store to your Android device or PC. To keep things legal and developers happy this app would only work on and for free apps. This way paid apps are protected and piracy is none. It isn’t really advisable to download and install apps which are not compatible for your device but it is better to try the app before you yourself could decide ifs performance satisfies you or doesn’t.

How to use APK Downloader?

Lets say we want to try the Path App for Android and for some reason Google Play Store decides that the app isn’t compatible for your device, the animations are heavy and won’t run on your device. But we know we can run that app. So let’s get to it.

  1. Locate the link to the App’s Google Play Store link you want to download.
    For Path App : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.path
  2. What we need to download APK from the APK Downloader is the last part of the link i.e. after the ‘?=id’, in this case its ‘com.path’. We use it on the APK Downloader site.

APK Downloader Guide

You can click on the ‘Click here to download com.path now’ to download the APK instantly.

Once that is done, you can load the app directly in your device if you are following this process on your Android Device or by transferring the APK from your PC to your SD card or device storage. Before you go ahead and start downloading a bunch of non-compatible apps I would like to warn you, developers very well understand how their app would perform on certain device, and that is the reason why they have a list of compatible devices for their App. If the app you install via this process doesn’t perform well on your device, do not leave a bad review to that app.

If you understand the risks to your device and performance issues you might face, then go ahead and start using the APK Downloader.

If for some reason you are not able to download more than few apps, don’t worry there is a quota which you might have hit. The solution to that is using their Google chrome Extension.
You can download and install the APK Downloader Chrome Extension here and it will not only remove that limit but also download APK files from your own Google Play Store account. Just in case you need it, there is a guide to how to install, configure and use that Chrome Extension.


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