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by codepoet80 1482 days ago
I think this mostly answers your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31611208

The other part is the community. People who had backed up their libraries. Devices found on eBay that still had a bunch of apps on them. People who had hoarded IPKs and had them saved on hard drives and were willing to share. That and lots of scraping Google by filename...