How you doing? hope you are doing well. I missed to post on december because I was juggling too much things at once and needed a break

Fdroid?

Fdroid is a free and open source Android application repository. You can use Fdroid via the F-Droid client or the F-Droid website. It is similar to the Google Play Store, but with a few key differences:

  • is free and open source
  • contains only open source applications
  • is not a commercial service
  • all google play dependencies are stripped out when publishing
  • goes through a series of automated tests & manual reviews before being accepted

How do I add a new app to Fdroid?

There are two options, choose one:

If you don’t want to do it yourself

If you want to do it yourself

  • Open a issue on Fdroid data with the appropriate yaml(metadata) file, you should create one with your metadata, refer this, this link & this for more information.

After being reviewed and added to the repository, it will avialable for everyone to download and install.

here is a basic example of the metadata yaml file:

Categories:
License:
AuthorName:
AuthorEmail:
AuthorWebSite:
WebSite:
SourceCode:
IssueTracker:
Changelog:
...etc

View the full file here

How do I publish updates to Fdroid?

The great thing about Fdroid is that it automatically detects new versions of your app from github and updates it there. So you just have to make a new tag in your repo and fdroid will handle the rest.

How did I publish to Fdroid?

I went through “do it yourself” and this is the pull request that I created.

AntiFeatures:
  - NonFreeAdd
Categories:
  - System
License: GPL-3.0-only
AuthorName: BluePie
...etc

View the full file is here

Google Play Store?

Goople PlayStore needs no explanation. It is a commercial service that is used by millions of users to download and install apps. It is a great way to monetize & distribute your apps. You need to buy a license with a one time fee though.

Anyway lets get started…

How do I publish/Update to Google Play Store?

  • First you create a new app,

  • Complete all the tasks in the Dashboard

  • Take build bundle in android studio.

  • Create store listing with appropriate data,

  • Note to upload the correct images

  • use the bundle from before and make a test release and promote it to production. (review process takes time)

The pain

  • Publishing to playstore especially when the app is OpenSource is a manual time consuming process vs the automated process in Fdroid.

  • There is a onetime fee for publishing to playstore.

  • Every release takes a week to get reviewed and published, even if it is OpenSource.

    • from my experience time differs between minor, major and bug fixes (based on semantic versioning)

  • The customer support is full of bots

  • Store is unfair

    • I got my app delisted because I had the word “AD” in the Icon.. eventhough there are other apps from playstore with 1m+ installs that also has the same, either way I had to change the Icon to get it back on the store.
    • I could not get a proper response from Support more on here

  • The feedback back system is not that great, If users encounter crash/ something is not working.. In github you can have a correct feedback loop but in playstore..its just an uninstall with a lower rating.

End

If you have an OpenSource App, spend less time updating it on Playstore. Stick with Github releases or Fdroid releases. Don’t even get my started on Apple app store.