I have to wait to publish on the play store. because I can’t use my PayPal account for that, and I need a credit card for play store. whatever so since my game is ready and there are lots of people online who want to test it I want to put it out there anyway? I was thinking of putting it on aptoide or websites like that but I’m concerned about safety. I don’t really know how this safety things work, so like if I want to publish on aptoide, for example, I’m supposed to send them the licensed version right? and what are the risks of working with people like that other than maybe my personal data being stolen? I mean is there a possibility if I send my licensed apk to an untrustable person can that person publish it on google play or something?
edit: sorry for my grammar mistakes im not native english speaker
The Google Play store identifies apps with their unique packageName. I would recommend, that you use a different packageName for each distribution channel. So you can use
com.example.game -> Google Play
com.example.game.samsung -> Samsung Galaxy Apps
com.example.game.aptoide -> Aptoide
This way you can track, where your app comes from. It’s not really complicated to repackage an APK and it should also be easy to change packageNames. You can implement a server side verification (packageName against signature), which can be also patched out from your app.
The only safe solution is, wait until you can publish to Google Play (if this should be your main distribution channel) and after that push the different packageNames to the others. Because you uploaded your game first with a specific packageName, no one else is able to use the packageName again on Google Play.
