An alternative to Google Play Store for Android users who want to access the normal app ecosystem without running Google Play Services or other Google binaries on their phones. It violates Google's TOS.
It doesn't. There is an option to log in anonymously, which uses one of several dozen "dummy" accounts operated by Aurora maintainers to sign in. As of late these dummy accounts have been getting rate limited, leading to anonymous aurora sessions not working as expected.
A commonly suggested workaround is creating your own personal dummy account used for nothing but signing into Aurora. Google first rate limiting Aurora's dummy accounts and then beginning to instaban personal dummy accounts is significant because it represents an escalation in their efforts to force all Android users into proprietary walled gardens (Play store).
I have no idea, but I guess it doesn't really matter. If you start sending massive amounts of spam through gmail, does it matter if you did it after logging into the site with your user/password or through oauth api access or through smtp?
Well, as an app store, it pretty much has complete access to your degoogled phone, but (until recently) it defaulted to a pool of shared google burner accounts that were only used to download software.