> The big one was the fact that silently installing apps was a privileged permission only allowed to preloaded system apps (with good reason). This prevented 3r

> The big one was the fact that silently installing apps was a privileged permission only allowed to preloaded system apps (with good reason). This prevented 3rd party stores from background updating apps because you had to manually confirm each update via system dialog. It's been a long time since I last looked at this, but not even Google Play installed apps silently. IIRC, what Google Play did was to tell the Google Play servers that you wanted to install the app, and the Google Play servers sent a message through C2DM/GCM to a system service on your phone, which downloaded and installed the app. The same thing happened if you opened the Google Play site on your desktop browser, and told it to install an app on your phone. Obviously, a third party store cannot tell the Google Play server to send that "install this APK" message to your phone; and even if they could, it would have to be one of the APKs available for download on the Google Play servers.