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.
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.
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
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.