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Advantages/Drawbacks of Android Apps on Itch

A topic by NightBlade created Apr 27, 2018 Views: 793 Replies: 2

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I'm trying to understand the trade-offs of publishing my Android apps here. From what I can tell from looking at other apps, the advantages look like:

More traffic/eyeballs from itch
I can have better marketing text than the Google Play store, because I can include images, etc. in the description

The only drawback I can see:

Most Android devices block APKs from non-Google-Play by default, so users have to enable installing unknown-sourced APKs to use the store

Is this accurate, or if not, what am I missing/misunderstanding?

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leafoAdmin6 years ago(+3)

That's a good summary. Since we aren't exactly known for hosting Android apps, we don't get that many people looking for them. Additionally, installing an Android app from the browser is quite a hassle. I recommend also having your game on Google Play and including the link on your page, you'll probably make it easier for people to install.

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NightBlade6 years ago(+2)

That sounds good, thanks for the tip. The actual problem I was trying to solve is described below.

I published an Android app, and with it, a parents/educators guide. The PDF and link to Google Play is available on my website.

Since then, I decided to switch over to a one-page site, and just link stuff to itch.io. So I'm in the process of cleaning up and uploading all my apps. I know itch.io allows you to upload non-executables (eg. Book), which is fantastic, but I also know Android makes it hard to install APKs from the web.

Linking Google Play sounds like the ideal solution. Thanks for this.

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