It’s like putting an android apk file on your website for an app.
If you’re giving it away for free to friends, sure.
If not, how do you sell it? How do you stop people stealing it? How do people find out about it?
Obviously, you the answer is usually “you write your own installer / updater” and do your own marketing.
Maybe that’s fun, and there’s something to be said for owning the entire stack… but it’s a loooot of work and probably not a reasonable financial decision to make.
>If not, how do you sell it? How do you stop people stealing it? How do people find out about it?
we solved that issue long ago: make the APK a thin client to the actual service you keep on a server. Devs don't care where you download your APKs anymore. that's what the 90+% piracy took from us: the idea of premium, offline games.
advertising is tricky, but if we're being honest with ourselves: google play has only been a hinderance to discovery these days. My ideal pipeline is uploading to F-droid and throwing an APK release on Github as well.
It’s like putting an android apk file on your website for an app.
If you’re giving it away for free to friends, sure.
If not, how do you sell it? How do you stop people stealing it? How do people find out about it?
Obviously, you the answer is usually “you write your own installer / updater” and do your own marketing.
Maybe that’s fun, and there’s something to be said for owning the entire stack… but it’s a loooot of work and probably not a reasonable financial decision to make.