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Your thoughts on Googleplay?

A topic by K. A. Laherty created 26 days ago Views: 159 Replies: 4
Viewing posts 1 to 3

I'm interested in how other developers feel about the updated requirements to keep your Googleplay developers account...

I just completed my verification form and truthfully; I was considering not doing this over the last two months. My biggest reason for considering not keeping my account is the requirement that if I wish to sell a game; I would need to publicly display my home address.

I think this may be understandable for an organization, where the address might be a small office space, but as a solo developer; I'm not interested in doxxing myself.

The reason I reluctantly filled in my verification is that I do actually enjoy porting code to Android and unfortunately; most people don't trust downloading games if they are not from the official store. Many Android forums will remove your posts if they contain *.apk links from external sources.

I'm interested in hearing other developers thoughts on this... Do you use a Googleplay developer account? Do you sell games on there, or do you just avoid the whole thing and try to sell on Itch or another site? Do you just avoid selling for Android and only release free games?

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I have a Google Play account. I have about 4 out of 25 Android games published there - the others are unpublished. 

The others are unpublished because I find the updating requirements cumbersome. It takes about a month to update all my games to the latest Android version and retest them. That's not practical because I'm not doing this full time, I have a day job. I don't sell enough games there to justify this update requirement either (because I don't have the funds to market the games).

Google Play's privacy policy requirements are also nuts. They need a dedicated page that is bot-readable. To create all of those, when I'm not tracking my users at all just seems a step too far.

People don't often buy / download my Android games here on itch.io.

I have a little success with Amazon.com - although recently someone pointed out to me that despite my games being published everywhere Amazon has stores, they're not available to download or play in other stores (possibly because they're not translated to that particular language). But I have more downloads and sales at Amazon and Huawei than at Google Play.

My games with IAP are not published at Google Play because I don't have the knowledge or resources to block all these spam apps that bypass Google's IAP and unlock the games for free. It's funny how Amazon, Huawei, and Samsung will all make the effort from their side to protect developers. Google will not.

Thanks! Yeah; I always found the update requirements over-the-top with Google... I've just let all my current apps get automatically removed.
I'll definitely go research the other stores that you mentioned. You've helped a lot :)

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I just release my games for free on the Playstore. If I ever see a game of mine getting 100 000 downloads then I might reconsider.

Had to update my games to a newer API recently, and yes it is way more cumbersome than it was the first time I put my games up there. Don't know if I'll ever do that again.

All my APKs are also available on itch of course. Never tried other stores like Amazon and Huawei, maybe should check those out.

Yeah; I remember having to do an update once, because an old API was considered to have something like "unsafe security features"-or something... but my app never actually touched any of those features. Then over time; I received two more emails claiming that I should update the apps and I couldn't be bothered... I can't remember how many downloads I was getting, but it wasn't much at all, so it just didn't seem worth it.
I'm hoping the other store fronts are a bit more indie-game-developer-friendly.