Service to publish apps on Google play store?

I think some developers would like to publish their app on the Google Play store, too.
Because I wonder how to do that and which requirements there are, I would like to ask the question before I investigate and forget to share the results:

Is it possible for F-Droid to upload apps to the Google Play Store?

My idea would be that there is an F-Droid organization on Google Play and when I add something like Google Play: yes to the Build Meta Data, then F-Droid publishes the app in the Play Store once it built it.
What are your thought on sharing apps in the Play Store automatically?

My thought: If I add an app to the Play Store, I would create an automatic build and signing. Why not share it easily with others?
I can understand if this is out of scope, since Google Play is another app store. I wonder if a 3rd-party service could solve that.

F-Droid won’t push apps into Google Play due to ethical, organizational and technical reasons.

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Thanks, I can imagine. However, this is very broad. One reason could be:

  • technical: it is not implemented
  • legal: the publisher may not agree with the terms of service as the publisher can not guarantee some demands
  • ethical: Google puts itself in a central position with this app store, can push their terms and not listen to the user so much.

Could you elaborate a bit more? As a contributor you may see it differently and more precide and I would like to hear and understand it.

The reasons I see:

  • Ethical: Google Play is a proprietary service. It does not respect people’s freedom and privacy–F-Droid’s base values.

  • Organizational: someone needs to manage the account, check that each app follows Google’s rules (and blacklist those that don’t), etc.

  • Technical: publishing into Google Play is not implemented, I don’t know whether it’s even possible to automate. Someone will have to maintain this procedure.

Actually, the key question is: why? Will F-Droid users benefit from this feature? No. Will this encourage Play users to switch to F-Droid? No. Note that this is not a matter of market share or business competition—F-Droid is a non-commercial project. This is about values.

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Thanks!

This is short and precise and takes the energy out of why I would do this.
Great to have this asked here and recorded, so others can educate
themselves :slight_smile:

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I agree that F-Droid should not integrate with Google Play for all the reasons listed. I also want to throw in my two bits on this topic. I do think that we should not ignore Google Play since the vast majority of Android devs focus on it. That’s why I think its important to integrate with free software tools like Fastlane and Triple-T Gradle Play Publisher so that with minimal effort, someone who is already publishing to Play can publish to F-Droid.

So I guess that’s kind of the inverse of what @niccokunzmann proposed. You could even build a system to automatically build, sign, and publish apps to multiple app stores using fdroidserver, Fastlane, etc.

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