Now that you mention it, some Signal/App Store/APK drama does seem familiar.

There's always been sketchy 3rd party app stores (F-Droid is WAY overrated). But this ApkPure looks awesome. Just rediscovered it upon your prompt. They seem to copy all actual APK's from the real Play Store too as a backup. They have past APK versions too, for when devs go wreck an update.

So it seems you could just default to APK Pure (being risk aware of course), bypassing the Play Store entirely. They have their own app too. Need to do some more research on them and any iPhone IPA (non-jailbreak) equivalent.