The main reason why I installed Cyanogenmod over my phone’s manufacturer’s Android was to get rid of all Google spying apps. Unfortunately, Android is tightly, militarily organized around Google tracking services. Notably, a huge majority of applications can only be obtained via the Google Play Store, because for some reason most developers don’t bother mirroring their APKs on their own.
Generally speaking, grabbing the APKs from Google Play is a game of cat and mouse, where the APK downloader extension for *cough* Chrome (works with Iron too, might be worth trying with Opera also, now that it’s turned into yet another Chrome clone) is the mouse regularly updated to bypass Google Play’s attempts at blocking it. In the case of Firefox, however, the APK can be found by searching through Mozilla’s FTP. If you try to get the Aurora version, you’ll notice that unlike stable and beta it’s not hosted on Google Play but on Mozilla’s servers. If you then browse around those, you’ll eventually also find APKs for beta and stable. For instance, the lasted stable version (at the moment Firefox 23) is available in this folder: https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/releases/latest/android/en-US/ (it’s the fennec-23.0.en-US.android-arm.apk file).
Note that F-Droid (a Google Play replacement with only open source apps, offering both automatic installation and APK downloads) is also a fine place to get APKs. And they do have Firefox stable there.
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