The Twilight Store (S3:E9)
This constant back-and-forth takes my attention away from development and does not make me work with serenity.
It’s obvious that there’s something wrong with the way we communicate but I don’t know if it’s me not providing the necessary information or if it’s them failing to explain what they want. Or, if they’ve already decided that the app should no longer use the permissions granted for more than 5 years and I’m wasting my time by keeping communicating with them.
In the end, I decided that it no longer makes sense to continue publishing this application in Play store.
I don’t think I will lose much from sales if I use other stores to sell it, since the presence on the Play store does not bring direct sales, those who buy the app do so because they learn about it from forums, reviews or search engines. And even if I lose something in terms of sales, not having to deal with this store is important to me both in terms of time and peace of mind. Of course, there remains the unknown as to how the other stores operate but I am not taking this decision without having done what is possible to clarify the current situation, I have been stalled in this situation for months now and the situation is only getting worse.
Let me take a moment to tell you what an independent developer thinks about the various app stores. For an independent developer stores like Apple’s and Google’s are very important and useful because allow us to sell applications to end users without having to create the infrastructure to do so. An infrastructure dificult to create and expensive to maintain.
It is no coincidence that it is mostly big companies that demand to be allowed to sell their products directly, they already have the infrastructure and saving 30% in commission is economically important. Of course, if the fees charged by the stores were lower it would be helpful for us as well, but I don’t think that’s the breaking point with them.
For us the biggest problem is how they see us, if they see us as a problem to be solved or eliminated, as a necessary evil or as a resource to be cultivated for direct and indirect returns.
Google knows how important we were in the early years when it was fighting the mobile phone war with Apple and Microsoft. Microsoft failed to get a high number of independent developers for its phones and maybe that also contributed to its failure.
Back to my app. I currently sell only the Android app from the Play store and the user can download the Windows, macOS, and Linux apps from my site. The Android app unlocks all the premium features of other operating systems’ version of the app. Now I have to do the opposite, have the Android app directly downloadable from my site and sell the Windows app from Steam or Microsoft store and the macOS version from Apple’s store. For Linux, I have yet to find a solution.
At this point — it’s been a couple of weeks since the last email communication, I am finally developing with serenity because I have already decided on how to proceed, I’m documenting on how to publish apps on other stores, I continue to write these posts for the future historians — the unthinkable happened, something that would get your adrenaline pumping more than the best episode of Twilight Zone and Black Mirror would do, something that makes you think that there is intelligent biological life also in Alpha Centauri, something that proves that the force is with you … THE PHONE CALL.
Don’t miss S3:E10
