HACKER Q&A
📣 chooma

What are alternative ways of publishing a mobile app successfully?


Who is running a success Mobile App without using Google/Apple app store and how are you doing?

I would like to know how we can deliver our apps in the future, without going through a detached gatekeeper; whom believes that having a canned-bot reply to your problem, constitutes as 'Good service'.

Backstory: We run a SaaS business telco which focusses on privacy. Needless to say, our mobile app is important to our customers. We are currently experiencing a problem publishing new app versions to Google Play, our app is being flagged as “uploading user’s contact data without consent”. We obviously aren’t doing this, but we also don’t know why Google thinks that we are and it’s not possible to speak to a real person, you only get automated responses when you try and appeal it.

English blog post: https://www.voys.co.za/blog/how-google-is-forcing-us-to-make-our-open-source-app-worse/ Dutch blog post: https://www.voys.nl/blog/hoe-google-ons-dwingt-onze-open-source-app-slechter-te-maken/

  👤 toast0 Accepted Answer ✓
Unless your user count is very small, you have to deal with Apple for iOS. There's limited ability to push apps outside the appstore, but you're not supposed to use it to bypass the store for unaffiliated users and Apple will figure it out, and you're likely not big enough for them to care about fallout from just banning you entirely.

For Android, you can offer direct apk downloads, but you also should try to stay in play. Depending on your market, some % of users will be willing to do a direct download, but likely a majority won't.

Also, Google has 'Play Protect' which will prompt users to remove apps they flag as malware --- if their store review process doesn't like your app, Play Protect might not either.

👤 jamesfinlayson
I believe Android doesn't allow gambling apps but there are a lot of gambling companies with gambling apps that need to be sideloaded.

From what I've heard, the Android apps don't have anywhere near as many users as the iPhone versions, and it's a struggle to get Android users to successfully install the app, but ultimately if it's a product that people want to use then they figure it out.

Also from what I've heard, they would much rather be in the Play Store than have to deal with getting people to sideload the app.

👤 max_
I don't think it's even possible to load iOS apps outside the App store.

Maybe you should roll back to an earlier version where your app wasn't flagged and compare code bases.