i was 5. i stumbled upon some ben 10 game that was just rebranded subway surfers. it costed 5 liras (jesus fucking christ!). i wanted it BAD. i begged my dad for it, getting the typical dad response "i'll look into it."
a couple days went by, i was still thinking of the game. i thought that my dad had just decided against it.
some minutes passed. my dad called me and said to close my eyes. i did. when i opened them, my dad had "bought" the game for me. i was so excited.
i'm putting "bought" in quotation marks because he didn't actually buy the game, rightfully so. instead he downloaded it from a strange app called Blackmart. it was basically this sort of underground app store where people share ccracked apps. he also showed me how i could download my own games too. needless to say, i did.
i downloaded a shit ton of games through there, mainly sonic games and android ports of console games. sonic advance, sonic advance 2, sonic 2, sonic 3 & knuckles, pororo, i can go on and on and on. whenever i saw some paid app or game i thought was cool, i straight went to blackmart to see if my homies had it. it was my #1 app store.
this continued on for a couple of years until doomsday hit. an update came like usual. i hit update and it started requiring some very peculiar permissions like cam n mic. the app had basically become malware and all the downloads for it had been pulled down.
i was sad. devastated. now where would i get all of my games? although fortunately i grew up and moved on to other platforms like aptoide and apkpure.
today? i still use those platforms today to get stuff not available on aurora store and fdroid, primarily for pirating games and getting old versions of apps. nowadays i don't rely on them as much but i still rely on them somewhat.
so yeah. that was my piracy backstory.