ProjectJourneyman

While I spent a considerable amount of time finding new Android app markets when I started this site and my book series 15 years ago, I don’t feel time has been very kind to many of the various Android app markets. Big players (such as Nokia and Microsoft) have entered and exited the app store scene over the years, but overall the trend is to exit. The wild west of apps and app stores is well behind us now, and there are only a few reasons that specialized app markets may still be beneficial.

Even the Amazon Appstore is closing on August 20, 2025.

It’s been quite a while since I took the Android Market Alternatives report off of the market – I just haven’t felt that investigating new app stores was worth the effort, and I put it on the back burner. As my main intention was to find new channels to distribute the same apps (with minimal additional effort to support the new stores), this has always been a numbers game. The natural conclusion of that is that app stores are only of use to us if they have a lot of users. At this stage of the game, everything has consolidated into a few of the largest players.

Where does this leave us?

For many developers, Google Play will likely be the only destination needed in 2025. With a reported 2.5 Billion monthly active users, availability on Google Play means being accessible to a huge number of potential users.

Samsung’s Galaxy App Store is one of the few standouts that can command a large number of users – and that’s largely because they make the hardware and put their own app store on it. All the same, I no longer think it is of much importance unless you are targeting an area not served by Google Play. That is likely a relatively small market these days, but may be important for some developers. Note that I’m not very familiar markets in languages other than English, so there may be other thriving app stores out there.

Those staunchly against censorship may gravitate towards the uncensored open-source repository F-Droid and various front-ends for it, but that comes with risks as a user and I haven’t investigated it enough to recommend looking at it.

Still Android!

Thanks to all my readers and customers over the years, this has been a fantastic journey and I appreciate all of the comment, questions, and stories.

This site has always evolved as my interests have – I’m a Journeyman of Projects as the site title implies, and the nature of these projects continues to evolve. I’m still deep in Android and will write on subjects such as Android development, cryptocurrencies and projects, and of course the role AI can play in software development. Onward!

If you’re using the Android Market Manager library to simplify your app over different Android app stores, and are also using Android Studio, the latest update should make things easier for you.

Also, I have a new tip to include GitHub code in your project without having to download it – you can include it as a dependency.

Of course, if you’re still using Eclipse then skip this update, and just start working on migrating your projects.  It’s worth the effort.

Referencing a local library

First, if you have the module on your local drive (but not in the same project) then add the following in your settings.gradle (substituting the location as appropriate)

include ':AndroidMarketManagerLib'
project(':AndroidMarketManagerLib').projectDir = new File(settingsDir, '../AndroidMarketManager/AndroidMarketManagerLib')

Next, add the following to the build.gradle for your module:

dependencies {
    compile project(':AndroidMarketManagerLib')
}

Referencing a library directly from GitHub

I just discovered this neat trick to link to code in GitHub that’s not already in a repo.  It helps keep code clean if you’re not going to modify sources at all.

First, your module’s build.gradle must add a new repo for JitPack (the second line):

repositories {
    jcenter()
    maven { url "https://jitpack.io" }
}

Next, add the dependency to the same build.gradle.  Note that the final string is the commit version; you can update this at JitPack.io by entering the GitHub project url and picking the latest commit.

dependencies {
    ...
    // Use jitpack.io to capture https://github.com/TimMackenzie/AndroidMarketManager
    compile('com.github.TimMackenzie:AndroidMarketManager:bc272e410c') {
        exclude module: 'AndroidMarketManagerTest'
    }
}

That’s it!