fundamentally, it's an app doing something the platform it's built on doesn't allow it to do, nor was it designed for.

In terms of the app, it's literally a shoehorned app store, and it's somehow better than the play store. How do you fuck up the playstore that badly? The bar is so low that a software repository that "technically" works is literally the bare minimum. Most of that is arguably the fault of android, because it's the single worst operating system in the world, apparently.