OffPlay Bridge

Who it's for

FOSS and indie Android maintainers who just announced (or are about to announce) they are leaving or reducing Google Play — the Conversations/Gultsch, NewPipe, and Simple Mobile Tools alumni crowd — and who currently track each release in a notes file and hand-upload signed builds to F-Droid MRs, Amazon's seller console, and ad-hoc GitHub release pages.

The problem

time and legal: each release costs 2–5 hours of manual artifact handling across 3–6 consoles/MRs, and the surrounding store policy checks (donation links, F-Droid mentions, sideload wording) can get a listing pulled; a two-person team shipping monthly loses a full day per cycle and risks a suspension that removes their only distribution.

How to build it

CLI (`offplay release ./app-release.apk --channels f-droid,amazon,galaxy,appgallery,selfhost`) plus a small dashboard that reads each channel's listing page and repo metadata, diffs versions, and emails a signed per-release receipt; F-Droid submission by opening an RFP/MR with the generated metadata file, Amazon/Samsung/Huawei via their public publisher APIs or a guided browser-session uploader for consoles without one.

How it makes money

Indie/FOSS maintainers pay $8–15/month or a one-time $99 'lifetime, no-lock-in' license because it saves a day per release and eliminates the paste-the-wrong-artifact class of mistake; they can't just use a free option because no free tool exists that talks to all these consoles at once, and doing it themselves is exactly the time sink they are trying to escape.

Why it doesn't exist yet

The incumbents skip it because the big stores have no interest in making cross-store distribution easy and each console has just enough API churn to make a generic service annoying; the indie gap is that a 1–3 person team can maintain adapter shims for the four or five stores that actually matter to FOSS devs and sell the relief of not doing it by hand every release.

First users

The first 10 users come from the comment threads and Matrix rooms around the 'Breaking Up with Google Play' post — maintainers publicly listing their alternatives right now; a single F-Droid MR template and a working Amazon uploader demo are enough for one to try it on their next tagged release.

Build size

2 people x 8 weeks: includes F-Droid RFP/MR generator + metadata templates, Amazon Appstore submission via the public publisher API, a guided uploader for Samsung Galaxy Store and Huawei AppGallery, a self-hosted download page with a signed release feed, a per-release receipt email, and a policy-lint pass (donation links, sideload wording, F-Droid mentions). Excluded: Google Play publishing (Trivial), paid store accounts, APK signing key custody, and any on-device install or F-Droid client work.

Biggest risk

A platform's console change (e.g. Amazon or Samsung deprecating the current upload API and forcing a new interactive-only flow) can break one adapter for weeks, and Google could make Play's own multi-channel tooling good enough that the perceived pain drops.

Conditions for a hit (all 3 required)

• Given one signed APK path plus a `store-meta.yaml` (name, package, changelog, donation URL, F-Droid metadata fields), the CLI produces a version bump across at least 3 of {F-Droid MR, Amazon Appstore, Samsung Galaxy Store, Huawei AppGallery, self-hosted page} in one command and prints the per-channel result with a public listing URL for each — verifiable by hitting those URLs 6 months after a tagged release.
• For every published release, the dashboard fetches each channel's live listing and emits a signed (or at least timestamped) 'release receipt' email/JSON showing the version number that each channel is actually serving, so a mismatch between the repo tag and any store is visible in under 60 seconds.
• The F-Droid path opens a merge request in a public git repo containing a valid `metadata/<package>.yml` and a build recipe for a small sample app, which a maintainer can accept without editing; the tool ships with at least one template that has been merged into a live F-Droid app repo by a third party.

How it's judged (in 6 months)

GitHub repo `offplay-bridge` (or equivalent named card tool) with ≥400 stars OR ≥25 documented releases pushed to ≥3 non-Google channels with public install/listening receipts posted by at least 5 distinct maintainers; judge checks the linked listing pages.(judgment date 2027-03-30)

AI self-confidence 42/100 — self-reported likelihood of meeting the criterion, not a business success rate