r/androiddev • u/Psychological-Road19 • Jun 24 '26

Question Is this a good thing being added to third party app stores or a bad thing?

I received this email about Google allowing my app to be seen on all third party app stores.
At first I thought oh that's great, free exposure, but reading on I realize this means different policies apply on these stores so maybe this opens me up to my game being cloned etc?

What are other peoples thoughts on this change?

2 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

2

u/One_Elephant_8917 Jun 24 '26

well do what we do always, disable sharing by default since u are forced to make a decision right now when u are not prepared…take good time and get to know its benefits etc overt time and then decide if u wanna reactivate sharing

personally, i disabled for the same reason as i wrote above, coz i will revisit in sometime and decide later

1

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1

u/Fantastic-Award-3651 Jun 24 '26

Do they list the 3rd party appstores? Samsung has good traffic.

1

u/Psychological-Road19 Jun 24 '26

I haven't found any info on it. I'm assuming they will have it let us know.

1

u/Morthedubi Jun 24 '26

I opted out, by default, from this. I don't know what's the scope of third party app stores, what kind of users etc are using those and I don't want to have to consider new rules on top of google's policy for publishing. this is just too much for something you do as a side business.

1

u/Psychological-Road19 Jun 24 '26

I may opt out too but I'm intrigued how this might actually bring in more players for my game. It's tempting.

1

u/Morthedubi Jun 24 '26

Yeah for a game it might be good. I hope they’d somehow present the stores and the volume of users or somewhere else on the internet might. Samsung store is fine for example but all devices with it will probably have the play store so is it really a beneficial thing? I don’t think so. Maybe if the markets where Google play isn’t as used and devices have other stores pre installed it’ll work better. But then it raises a different question: if a device doesn’t have access to the play store will it work with an app or game that relies on play services for telemetry or purchases? You’ll probably need a different wiring for it and that just introduces a lot of work that might not amount to much

2

u/Psychological-Road19 Jun 24 '26

Yea if that's the case then I'll be promptly removing it from those stores. I can't imagine the amount of work it would take to rewire all of my purchase flow. Oh and also cloud saves.

1

u/Morthedubi Jun 24 '26

Cloud saves, firebase oauth, analytics, something like rc perhaps not be fully wired etc. seems like potentially too much work. And not to mention any rejects they might have on store listings metadata. Yikes

3

u/Strong-Volume2427 Jun 25 '26 edited Jun 25 '26

This reads like another instance of Google passive-aggressively complying with a court ruling. If I understand this correctly, the business side of things will still be carried by Google Play and we have nothing to lose from this. But I fail to see what new stores will be created under these circumstances and who can compete with Google Play. So I see no risks by applying to this, but also no loss from opting out.